MEN AND MEASURES

MEN AND MEASURES

A HISTORY OF

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

ANCIENT AND MODERN

BY

EDWARD NICHOLSON, F.I.C., F.C.S.

SURGEON LIEUT.-COLONEL ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT

AUTHOR OF ‘A MANUAL OF INDIAN OPHIOLOGY’

‘THE STORY OF OUR WEIGHTS AND MEASURES’ ‘FLOURETO DE PROUVÈNÇO’ ETC.

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1912

[All rights reserved]

ERRATA.

PREFACE

This history is the development of a short story of the Imperial System of Weights and Measures published eleven years ago, but withdrawn when this fuller work took shape. To have made it at all complete would have required a long lifetime of research; to give and discuss every authority, to trace, even to acknowledge, every source of information would have unduly swollen the volume and slackened the interest of the narrative. I offer it with all its shortcomings as an attempt to show the metric instincts of man everywhere and in all time, to trace the origins and evolution of the main national systems, to explain the apparently arbitrary changes which have affected them, to show how the ancient system used by the English-speaking peoples of the world has been able, not only to survive dangerous perturbations in the past, but also to resist the modern revolutionary system which has destroyed so many others less homogeneous, less capable of adaptation to circumstances.

E. N.

Feb. 1912.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MEN AND MEASURES

CHAPTER I
GENERAL VIEW

The earliest measures were those of length, and they were derived from the rough-and-ready standard afforded by the limbs of man.

The readiest of these measures were those offered by the length of the forearm, and by parts of the hand; these formed a natural series of far-reaching importance.

These arm-measures were—

1. The Cubit, the length of the bent forearm from elbow-point to finger-tip, about 18 to 19 inches.

2. The Span, the length that can be spanned between the thumb-tip and little finger-tip of the outstretched hand. It is nearly half of the cubit, about 9 inches.

3. The Palm, the breadth of the four fingers, one-third of the span, one-sixth of the cubit, about 3 inches.

4. The Digit or finger-breadth at about the middle of the middle finger, one-twelfth of the span, one-twenty-fourth of the cubit = 3/4 inch.

From this division of the cubit into 6 palms and 24 digits, and of its half, the span, into 12 digits, came the division of the day into watches and hours, of the year into months; came also the consecration of the number 12 in legend, history, and social institutions—came in short duodecimalism wherever we find it.

Add to the above measures the outstretch of the arms, the fathom, we have the five primitive limb-lengths.

A time came when civilisation required the fixing of a standard cubit. It was perhaps at first an arbitrary standard, but it became fixed by law in the most ancient Eastern Kingdoms and, about the fortieth century before the Christian era, perhaps much earlier, certainly by the time of the Egyptian fourth dynasty, it had been fixed at a length known for certain to be equal to 18·24 English inches.

This was no arbitrary standard, any more than that of the English yard or the French metre. I may say that, apart from parochial varieties and convenient trade-units, always referable to some recognised standard, there are no arbitrary standards in any country; all have a directly scientific basis or a lineage reaching, perhaps far back, to a scientific basis. They may have deviated, by carelessness, or even by petty fraud, from some accepted standard, but wholesale trade has always been a conservator of standards.

There is not the slightest doubt that the common cubit of ancient Egypt, brought probably from Chaldæa, was deduced from the measurement of the earth, from the quarter-meridian distance between the pole and the equator. There are no written records of this measurement; but an imperishable monument remained to record it, and other ancient monuments still remain to corroborate this testimony. The base of the Great Pyramid was, from ancient times, always known to be 500 cubits long on each side, and it is found to be exactly half a meridian mile, or 500 Egyptian fathoms, in perimeter.

There is no doubt that the wise men of the ancient Eastern Kingdoms had great astronomical knowledge and were capable of making the necessary meridian measurement.

Bailly (author of ‘Histoire de l’Astronomie,’ 1775-1787) wrote:

The measurement of the earth was undertaken a vast number of ages ago in the times of primitive astronomy.... We pass contemptuously by the results of ancient astronomical observations; we substitute others and, as we perfect these, we find the same results that we had despised.

It will be seen that these ancient observations were of great accuracy, and that modern science cannot improve much on the measurements of the meridian that were made on the plains of Chaldæa, or along the Nile, at least sixty centuries ago.

The unit of distance used at the present day by seamen of all nations, the meridian mile, one-sixtieth of a degree, is exactly 1000 Egyptian fathoms, or 4000 Egyptian meridian cubits, and the Great Pyramid was built with a base measuring exactly 500 of these cubits along each side and 500 of these fathoms in perimeter.

It had probably been found convenient before that time to take a shorter unit than the cubit for use in many everyday measurements. It was two-thirds of the cubit, one-sixth of the fathom, and was called a Foot from its being roughly about the length of a long human foot. Apparently one of the primitive limb-measures, it is really an outcome of the cubit, ‘foot’ being merely a convenient name for it. The foot of the meridian cubit was of 4 palms or 16 digits and was = 12·16 English inches.

The Egyptian standards of linear measure, thus adjusted to the meridian mile, passed to Greece, and under the name of ‘Olympic’ became the Greek standards of length.

The use of the cubit and foot series of measures is seen in Hesiod (ninth century B.C.):

Hew a mortar three feet (tripodīn) in diameter, and a pestle three cubits (tripichtēn), and an axletree seven feet (heptapodīn) ... and hew a wheel of three spans (trispithamon) for the plough-carriage of ten palms (dekadōro) length.

Besides the original division of the foot into 16 finger-breadths or digits, there arose an alternative division into 12 thumb-breadths or inches. So for the Roman foot, of shorter standard than the Egyptian or Olympic foot from which it was derived—

Pes habet palmos iv, uncias xij, digitos xvi,

Palmus habet digitos iv, uncias iij.

It may be said that with the foot originated the sexdecimal system, as with the span the duodecimal system. But the foot had as many inches, twelve, as the span had of digits; and this division was the same in other feet or spans not differing much from the Olympic standard.

The popularity of the foot, its general adoption for the common purposes of life, are due to its being divided into either 12 inches or 16 digits, the familiar thumb-breadths and finger-breadths. Every popular system meeting the convenience and the ways of thought of men and women, must have its measures of length approximately coinciding with the familiar units of limb-lengths, and it must be divided sexdecimally or duodecimally to enable people, men, women and children, to calculate mentally in the everyday business of life.

The octonary or semi-sexdecimal mode of division seen in our Pint-Gallon-Bushel series is also very convenient, especially for measures of capacity and for land-measures, admitting extensive halving and quartering with subordinate units at each division. Duodecimal division having the convenience of thirding is convenient for the coinage series. A combination of the score and dozen series, as in our money-pound of 20 × 12 pence, combines the advantages of extensive halving and thirding.

But never has man taken to a decimal series of weights and measures; he may use them on compulsion, and then will evade them whenever he can. He has ten fingers, whence decimal numeration from the earliest times; but he has always rejected decimal measures.[^[1]]

If to the inconvenience of not being able to halve a unit more than once (and that only as a concession to unscientific weakness of mind), so that there is an interval of ten units between each named unit of the series, be added that the familiar units of common life, the thumb-breadth, the span, the foot, the pound, the pint, have no representatives in a decimal system, then no cajolery of science or patriotism will persuade men and women to use the system, except under police compulsion, and every trick will be used to evade it. Such are the ways of the human mind. Systems that are suited to popular convenience, both in wholesale and retail trade; systems that admit of modification and improvement—these will live. Systems imposed by police-force in which the people must fit themselves to the system—these are bound to fail.

The convenient foot being taken as subsidiary to the cubit, it afforded, for long measurements, larger units which harmonised with the cubit, and with its half, the span. The most usual long unit has been the Fathom and its double—

This Rod, varying according to the local standard of the foot or the span, is that nearly always used in countries round the Mediterranean. In northern countries where the foot has superseded the span for measures of any length, 16 feet instead of 16 spans is a usual length for the rod-measure.

It is a curious fact in the history of human nature that neither ancient Egypt nor the other Eastern monarchies kept to the meridian cubit and the measures based on it. While it survived in Greece, it was abandoned, officially at least, in Egypt, Assyria, and Persia. Influences in which science was mixed with astrolatry caused a second cubit to arise, even at the time of the building of the Great Pyramid, and this cubit superseded the meridian cubit as the official standard of the Eastern Kingdoms. Centuries passed and other cubits, not many, five or six at the most, arose through analogous influences. From these Eastern cubits, and from the Roman linear measures based on a mile eight-tenths of the meridian mile, all the various systems of the civilised world have been evolved.

From linear measures, the fathom and the rod, came measures of surface which, quickly in some countries, slowly in others, superseded more primitive estimates of cultivated area. A very usual unit of land-length and of road-distance was the customary length of the furrow. In all times and countries the peasant has found that a certain length of furrow, often about 100 fathoms or 50 rods, was convenient for himself and his plough-cattle. A strip of land of this length, and of one or more rods in breadth, would become a unit of field-measurement, and in time this superficial extent, in some shape or other, would become a geometrical standard.

Commerce, even of the most primitive kind, led to two other forms of measure—to Weight and Capacity. The capacity of the two hands, that of a customary basket or pot, that of the bottomed cylinder obtained from a segment of well-grown bamboo, would be superseded by that of a vessel containing a certain weight of corn, oil or wine, as soon as the goldsmith had devised the balance. Seeds of generally constant weight such as those of the locust-tree, used for weighing the precious metals, would soon be supplemented by a larger standard for heavier weighing; and the weight of a cubic span or a cubic foot of water would afford a suitable unit. A vessel containing a cubic foot of water thus afforded a standard, the Eastern Talent, both for weight and for capacity. The cubic foot would become a standard for the measure of oil or wine, while this measure increased, usually by 22 or 25 per cent., so as to contain a talent-weight of corn, generally of wheat, would become the Bushel or otherwise-named standard of capacity, for the peasant and for corn-dealers.

The peasant would use his bushel not only to measure his corn, but also to estimate his land according to the measure of seed-corn it required. He would also take a day’s ploughing on a customary length of furrow, as a rough measure of surface, and the landlord would estimate the extent of his property by the number of yoke of plough-cattle required to work it. These seed-units and plough-units would in time be fixed, and thus become the basis of agrarian measures.

In the meantime coinage would have arisen. A subdivision of the talent would become the pound or common unit of weight in the retail market, and a subdivision of the pound would be fixed as the weight of silver which, impressed with signs guaranteeing its fineness, if not its actual weight, would be the currency of the merchants.

Then arose, by involution, another system of weights in which the pound was usually of 12 or 16 ounces, and the ounce was the weight of so many standard coins. Every modern pound was based on this system. But again, the pound of silver would yield a certain number of coins, giving rise to a new monetary system under which the coin-origin of the pound would in time be forgotten.

The necessary state-privilege of coining money sometimes led to differences between mint-weight and commercial weight. Just as there arose in the ancient East a royal or sacred cubit different from that in vulgar use, so there arose in many countries a royal pound used in the mint and different from the vulgar commercial weight. In many countries, ancient and modern, the mint has kept up systems of weight consecrated by tradition but obsolete for all other uses, and out of harmony with commercial weight.

The scientific measurement of time had early been established by the astronomers who had measured the meridian.

The skilled artisans who constructed astronomical instruments and the standard measures of capacity and weight must have observed that the water contained in the standard measure of capacity weighed more when it was as cold as possible than when at the temperature of an Eastern summer; they could not fail to develop the idea of thermometry thus made evident to them. Nor could anyone fail to see that oil was lighter than water, strong wine than unfermented, and spring-water than brine or sweet juices. Some means of aræometry, by an immersed rod or bead, would be devised to avoid the trouble of finding their density by the balance.

It may thus be said that the scientists and skilled artisans of very ancient Eastern lands were fully as capable of constructing a scientific system of weights and measures as Western Europeans in our eighteenth century.

Good systems were carried by commerce to less advanced countries; if convenient they took root, partially or entirely, and, with such modifications as circumstances caused or required, they spread and were in due time given legal sanction.

Such is the usual course of evolution in the formation of a system of weights and measures from a linear measure.

A modification of the original linear standard may lead to the evolution of a new system. Thus, when the Romans took as their foot 1/5000 of a short mile of 8 Olympic stadia instead of 1/6000 of the meridian mile of 10 stadia, this new foot was the starting point of a new system.

Another process of evolution, or rather of involution, may occur from an imported standard of capacity. Supposing that trade has carried a certain measure to a country which it supplies with corn, and that this measure has been adopted, with divisions convenient to the people: from this corn-measure another measure, about 4/5 of it, may be constructed, containing the same weight of wine or water that the former contains of corn; here will be a standard fluid measure, and perhaps some fraction of it filled with water may be taken as a standard of weight. Let now some cubical vessel be constructed to hold exactly the standard measure of water; the length or breadth of each side will give a linear unit which, if it approximate sufficiently with a foot or span to which the people are accustomed, will offer a fixed linear standard in harmony with the other standards. Thus, from a convenient foreign unit of capacity or of weight, a new and complete system of national measures may be constructed by involution.

It will be seen that several cases of such involution have happened. There is indeed no documentary evidence for them, and often very little for the more usual processes of evolution. But the evidence for the origin of most weights and measures is entirely circumstantial; it is by the study of metrology, founded on research into the systems of different countries, that the student is able to weigh circumstantial evidence, to use it prudently, to guard himself against mere coincidence, to clear away legend, to examine documentary evidence carefully, to read between the lines of records, often very deceptive if he come to them unprepared.

The various systems which have developed by these processes, generally of evolution, but sometimes of involution, lose the appearance of Babel-confusion they had before their development could be explained otherwise than by fanciful legend or despotic caprice. But once the right point of view is found, unity is seen in the hitherto bewildering variety, and the trend of the human mind is seen to be regular in the systems that it evolves, in its way of meeting difficulties, in its acceptance of changes which are real improvements, in its aversion to arbitrary changes, in its devices for evading despotic interference with what it has found convenient.

[1]. Even in numeration he often prefers to count by the score. The Welshman says dega-dugain (10 and 2-score), the Breton quarante et dix, other Frenchmen quatre-vingt-dix (4 score and 10)

CHAPTER II
THE STORY OF THE CUBITS

The story of the cubits and of the talents, the great units of weight evolved from the cubits, is part of the history of the ancient and medieval Eastern Kingdoms, so intimately is it connected with their mutual relations, with their astrolatric ideas, and with the influence of those ideas on their science and art. This story, extending over more than fifty centuries, from long before the building of the Great Pyramid to near the tenth century of our era, explains the evolution of all weights and measures, ancient and modern.

The standard of the cubits has come down to us in great monuments, the measurements of which show undoubted unity of standard, and ancient histories and records often state the dimensions in the original cubits or in other cubits. Sometimes the actual wooden measures used by architects or masons are still extant; sometimes weights known to have been derived from these cubits either survive or can be ascertained. Thus in various ways the original length of the ancient cubits is known more accurately than that of many modern standards of length.

1. The Egyptian Common, or Olympic Cubit

A certain record of this cubit remains in the Great Pyramid. It is known to have measured 500 cubits along each side of the base, 2000 cubits or 500 fathoms being the perimeter of the base. The measurement made by our Ordnance Surveyors gave 760 feet for the side. The latest measurement, by Mr. Flinders Petrie, is not quite 6 inches longer. Taking the Ordnance Survey figure we have (760 × 12)/500 = 18·24 inches as the length of the common cubit, and two-thirds of this gives 12·16 inches for the common foot, or the Olympic foot as it is called from the adoption of this standard by the Greeks.

This length, supported by measurements of other ancient monuments, may be regarded as certain. Four cubits or six Olympic feet were contained in the Egypto-Greek orgyia or fathom, and this measure = 72·96 inches or 6·08 feet, is exactly one-thousandth of the 6080 feet length of the Meridian or Nautical Mile.

This cubit, common to the three great ancient kingdoms, Babylonia, Egypt, and afterwards Assyria, originated probably in Chaldæa, passing to Egypt with the earliest civilisation of that country, and thence to Greece. The name of Olympic thence attached to this standard must not make us forget its origin. The saying of Sir Henry Maine, ‘Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in the world which was not Greek in its origin,’ is not exact unless we include as Greek the great kingdoms conquered by Alexander, and which, under the Roman empire and afterwards under the Saracen caliphates, continued to have great influence over the civilisation of the West.

The Meridian Mile

At least sixty centuries ago the Chaldæan astronomers had divided the circumference of the earth, and of circles generally, into 360 degrees (that is 6 × 60) each of 60 parts. There is good reason to believe that they, before the Egyptians, who had the same scientific ideas, had already measured the terrestrial meridian and determined the length of the mean degree and of its sixtieth part, the meridian mile.

Owing to the flattening of the globe towards its poles, meridian degrees are not of equal lengths; they increase in length from the equator, so that their sixtieth parts are—

The mean length is at about 49° N. where the degree and mile are—

69·091 statute miles; 1/60 = 6080 feet.

The perimeter of the base of the Great Pyramid is exactly half of that length, i.e. 3040 feet.

The length of the meridian mile, 1000 Olympic fathoms = 4000 Olympic feet, was divided by the Greek geometers (and probably by the Egyptians and Chaldæans long before them) into 10 stadia, each of 100 fathoms = 600 Olympic feet = 608 feet, which is about our present cable length. And the meridian or nautical mile, used by seamen of all nations, is this same Egypto-Greek mile of 6080 feet = 2026-2/3 yards = 1013-1/3 fathoms = 1·1515 statute miles. It is sometimes put at 6082-2/3 feet. French geometers estimate it at 1852·227 metres = 6076-3/4 feet, one ten-millionth of the quarter-meridian being = 1·0002 metre. The nautical mile is sometimes called a knot, in the sense of a ship going so many nautical miles in an hour, as ascertained by the number of knots of the log-line, each 1/120 of a nautical mile or 50-2/3 feet, run out in half a minute, 1/120 of an hour.

The meridian mile must not be confounded with the geographical or equatorial mile, 1/60 degree along the equatorial circumference = 6087-1/3 feet.

Greek Itinerary Measures

Though a length of 10 stadia is a meridian mile, neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks appear to have used this mile as an itinerary measure. Herodotus says:

All men who are short of land measure it by Fathoms; but those who are less short of it, by Stadia; and those who have much, by Parasangs; and such as have a very great extent, by Schoinoi. Now a Parasang is equal to 30 stadia, and each Schoinos, which is an Egyptian measure, is equal to 60 stadia.

The Parasang of 30 stadia was then 3 meridian miles, the modern marine league, 1/20 of a degree.

The Schoinos was probably common to Egypt and to Chaldæa. The Chaldæans venerated the numbers 6, 60, 600, &c., and their sexagesimal scale, making the year 6 × 60 + 5 days and the circle 6 × 60 degrees each of 60 minutes, has prevailed. The Olympic or Egyptian-Greek measures of distance were on this scale, though land-measures were, officially at least, on a decimal scale.

Between the Stadion and the Schoinos there is a long gap, but the Greeks, for whose small country the Stadion was a convenient unit, used, when abroad, the Persian Parasang of 3 meridian miles, = 1/7200 of the meridian circumference.

The rise of other cubits obscured the Olympic series of measures. The Schoinos became absorbed in the Parasang, and under the Roman domination it became a measure of 32 stadia or 4 Roman miles. The Stadion also came to vary; it was nearly always of 100 fathoms, but these might be fathoms of systems varying from the Olympic. The slightly different term Schoinion, meaning a rope or chain, was applied to a measure of 10 fathoms.

The Roman Mile

The Romans took for their itinerary unit a length of 8 Olympic stadia and, dividing it into 1000 paces or double steps, called it a mille (mille passus) or mile. The Roman mile and pace are therefore respectively four-fifths of the meridian mile and the Olympic fathom—

8/10 of 6080 ft. = 4864 ft. = 1621-1/3 yards.

The pace was divided into 5 feet.

1/5 of 4·864 ft. (or 58·368 inches) = 11·673 inches.

There was in course of time some slight variation in the length of the Roman foot. It has been calculated at between 11·65 and 11·67 inches. The best value appears to be that of Greaves at 11·664 inches, but 11·67 seems to me sufficiently accurate, and corresponding better to other Roman measures.

The pace was also divided into quarters (palmipes) of a foot and a palm.

The foot was divided into 16 digits or into 12 inches (pollices). Roman dominion over Greece and Egypt led to some modifications, probably local, in measures of distance. There was a Roman schœnus of 4 miles, and the mile was divided, sometimes into 10 Olympic stadia, sometimes into 8 Pythic stadia of 500 feet or 100 paces.

It will be seen that the English mile was originally 5000 Roman feet, and then 5000 English feet, before being fixed at its present length of 5280 feet or 1760 yards.

2. The Egyptian Royal Cubit (c. 4000 B.C.)

The possession of a geodesic cubit, 1/4 of the fathom which was 1/1000 of the meridian mile, did not satisfy the astrolatric priesthood of Egypt. Under their influence another cubit, of 7 palms = 20·64 inches, became the official measure of Egypt, and it was used in the planning of the monuments, always excepting the outside plan of the Great Pyramid.

What could have been the reason for this change, from the scientifically excellent and fairly convenient common cubit to this less convenient length, and for bringing the inconvenient number seven into the divisions and making both palms and digits different in length from those of the common cubit?

No valid reason can be found other than the desire to institute, by the side of the common cubit in which the 6 palms and 24 digits corresponded to the watches and hours of the day, a sacred cubit in which the 7 palms would correspond to the seven planets or to the week of seven days, and the 28 digits to the vulgar lunar month of four weeks of seven days.[^[2]] Among us, at the present day, astrology is far from being dead; the days still bear the names of the seven planets ruling successively the first hour of the days named respectively after them; we call, however unconsciously, men’s temperaments or characters according to the mercurial, jovial, saturnine and other influences of the planets which rule the hour of birth. It is not for us then to criticise severely the pious desire of a learned priesthood or of a theocratic king to institute a sacred standard of linear measure with divisions corresponding in number to the seven planets which ruled the destinies of man, whose influence ruled them through the Christian middle ages, which at the present day still rule the world in the minds of the great majority of mankind. The royal or sacred cubit became the official cubit of the Eastern great kingdoms, the common or meridian cubit being also used, not only for ordinary purposes, but sometimes along with it. Thus, the external dimensions of the Great Pyramid are in common cubits, while the unit of its internal dimensions is the royal cubit, perhaps recently established at the time of the building.[^[3]] And centuries after the institution of the royal cubit, the meridian cubit became the standard of the Greeks.

The question naturally arises—Why was the royal cubit not formed by simply adding a seventh palm to the common cubit, a palm of the same length, = 3·04 inches, as the six others? This would have given a new cubit of 18·24 × 7/6 = 21·28 inches, instead of 20·64 inches in 7 palms of 2·95 inches. And it will be seen that this was actually done, fifty centuries later, by the caliph Al-Mamūn.

The answer I venture to give is, that the royal cubit was intended to be, not only by its division a homage to the seven planets, but also, by its increase of length, a symbol of the proportion of latitude to longitude at some Egyptian observatory.

Possibly it was a practical commemoration of the art of determining longitude. On this hypothesis the new cubit was made as much longer than the old cubit as the mean degree of latitude is longer than the degree of longitude in 29° N., at an observatory about 50 meridian miles south of the Pyramids. In that parallel, the proportion of the degree of longitude to the degree of latitude is 1 : 1·13, or as 18·24 to 20·64.

Measurements of monuments, both in Egypt and in the Babylonian and Assyrian Kingdoms, show that 20·64 inches was the length of the royal cubit, and actual cubit measures now extant do not vary from it more than one-or two-hundredths of an inch. There are at least ten of these cubits in museums and in other collections. One, a double cubit, is in the British Museum; another, very perfect, is in the Louvre; another, of rough graduation, but accurate length, is in the Liverpool Museum. There may be others, generally unknown. I found one, apparently unrecorded, in the museum of Avignon.

As the Pyramids are very nearly in the same parallel of latitude as the southern limits of Babylonia, near Ur of the Chaldees, it is possible that the length of the royal or sacred cubit may have been as acceptable to the priesthood of Babylonia as that of Egypt. This would account for the prevalence of the seven-palm cubit throughout the Eastern great monarchies. Perhaps the new cubit may have been instituted internationally between the Bureau des Longitudes of Egypt and that of Babylonia.

As in the case of the common cubit, two-thirds of the royal cubit were taken for the royal foot = 13·76 inches, a measure which when cubed will be seen to be the source of our Imperial system of weights and measures.

The inconvenience of a cubit of 7 palms is increased when two-thirds of it are taken for the foot; this foot, being 4-2/3 palms or 18-2/3 digits, was possibly divided for popular use into 16 digits, if it were ever in popular use. For scientific and probably for popular use it appears to have been divided into 2 feet = 10·32 inches. This may be inferred from the division of the degrees, attributed to Eratosthenes (third century B.C.), into 700 stadia, each 600 of these feet. Probably 700 is a round number, for, on the basis of this foot, the degree would be 706·8 stadia.

Three centuries later Pliny gave the base of the Great Pyramid a length of 883 feet. The modern measurement being 760 feet = 9120 inches, we have 9120/883 = 10·328 as the length of the foot in Pliny’s account, a length differing by less than 1/100 inch from that of the half-cubit.

The investigations of Fréret, Jomard, Letronne and other mathematicians led them to the conclusion that the ancient Egyptians had surveyed their land so exactly as to know its dimensions to a cubit near, and that certainly at some unknown time they had measured an arc of the meridian and established their measures on the basis of the meridian degree with no less exactness than has been done in modern times.

I have put aside all attempts, often connected with theology, to show that the base of the Great Pyramid was 220 double cubits (of 2 × 20·61 inches), the same number as the yards in an Elizabethan furlong, or that its other dimensions were intended to hand down the English inch, or the gallon, or the squaring of the circle, or the laws of harmonic progression.

3. The Great Assyrian or Persian Cubit
(c. 700 B.C.)

The Egyptian idea of increasing the cubit appears to have also seized the Assyrian monarchy many centuries later. It was increased to 8 palms, as different from those of the Egyptian royal cubit as these were from those of the meridian cubit.

This new measure is the cubit of Ezekiel, the ‘great cubit,’ the ‘cubit and a handbreadth,’ = 25·26 inches.

The same question as that presented by the increased cubit of Egypt arises in the case of the Assyrian cubit. What reason can be suggested for an increase such as to again disturb the palm and the digit? The advantage of having a standard of 8 palms divisible into 2 feet of 4 palms, could have been obtained far more simply and conveniently by adding an eighth palm equal to the others, making it 23·6 inches, with a half giving a foot = 11·8 inches. Or two palms might have been added to the common cubit, making a new cubit = 24·32 inches, with the Olympic foot as its half.

I again venture a similar explanation. The increase from the length of the Egyptian royal cubit corresponds to the ratio of the degree of longitude to the degree of latitude in 35·5° N., i.e. 1 : 1·224—

1 : 1·224 :: 20·64 : 25·26.

This position was only 30 meridian miles from the parallel of 36° N., a line which, passing through Rhodes and Malta to the Straits of Gibraltar, was considered by the ancient geographers as the first parallel and was the base-line of their maps. It was called by the Greek geographers the ‘diaphragm of the world.’[^[4]]

This line passing also a few miles south of Nineveh, it is possible that some observatory near that capital city, a few miles south of 36°, may have been the point at which the difference in the lengths of the degrees of longitude and of latitude was determined for the standard length of the new cubit.

There is an alternate hypothesis. The Egyptian royal cubit was increased by 1·224 to make the Great Assyrian cubit. Now this is about the proportion in which a measure containing a certain weight of water must be increased in height to contain the same weight of wheat. This proportion, the water-wheat ratio, is something between 1·22 and 1·25, the former being the usual ratio with the heavier wheat of Southern countries. Supposing a cubical vessel measuring a royal cubit of 20·64 inches in each side, therefore containing 8792 cubic inches = 317 lb. of water (which was the Great Artaba) to be increased in height so as to hold the same weight of wheat, its height would now be 1·224 × 20·64 = 25·26 inches. This might have been taken for a new cubit.

This would not prevent the new cubit, the Great Assyrian cubit, being itself in course of time cubed to form the Den measure, as its half, the foot, was cubed for its weight of water to make the Greek-Asiatic talent.

However this be, the great Assyrian cubit, which continued to be used in the Persian empire, had the advantage of being divided into 8 palms and of making a good two-foot rule, though its half, the foot, was rather too long for popular use. This cubit exists to this day in Egypt, being the basis of the Reed or Qasáb. This is the ‘full reed of six great cubits’ (Ezek. xli.), the ‘measuring rod of six cubits by the cubit and a handbreadth,’ that is the old seven-palm cubit with a palm added. The Qasáb = 151·16 inches is = 12 Assyrian feet.

Yet, for the common purposes of life, a foot = 12·63 inches was too long to be popular; everywhere the people like a short foot, especially in the South and the East. Moreover the cubit was a departure from the simple geodesic standard of the meridian cubit. Accordingly there was devised in Persia a cubit satisfactory both to the scientific class and to the people, with a simple geodesic standard for scientific purposes and a convenient short foot for the common purposes of life. This was the Beládi cubit. It is perhaps the best of the cubits.

4. The Beládi Cubit (c. 300 B.C.)

The new Persian cubit, known as the Beládi (from belád, country), had the advantage, first, of a simple relation to the Parasang or meridian league of 30 stadia = 1/20 degree; secondly, of it being divisible into two feet of convenient length.

The meridian mile being = 6080 feet or 72,960 inches the parasang is therefore 3 × 72,960 = 218,880 inches; and the Beládi cubit, 1/10000 of the parasang, was therefore = 21·880 inches. This is the length that John Greaves gave in 1645 as his measurement of what he called the Cairo cubit, one of the different standards that have accumulated in Egypt during sixty centuries.

The Beládi cubit is still to be found in the East. A half Beládi cubit = 10·944 inches, a convenient foot for Eastern use, passed to Spain with the Moors and became the Burgos foot, the standard of which was allowed to go astray after the fall of the Moorish dominion. But the Spanish shore-cubit (Covado di ribera) still exists at the standard of 21·9157 inches.

The Beládi cubit is that used by Posidonius (131-53 B.C.). He gave the circumference of the globe as 240,000 stadia, which = 666·66 to the degree, or 11·111 to the meridian mile of 6080 feet or 72,960 inches, 72,960/11.111 = 6566 inches or 10 fathoms of 65·66465 inches, exactly 3 Beládi cubits or 6 half-cubits.

It is interesting to find this Greek philosopher, settled in Rome, reckoning the circumference of the globe accurately on the basis of the Beládi cubit of Persia. Coupling this with the use by the Hebrews of the Bereh equatorial cubit brought back from the Captivity, the date of the Beládi meridional cubit is evidently at some centuries before the Christian era.

The Bereh or Equatorial Land-mile.

The Jews brought back from the Captivity a measure known as the Cubit of the Talmud. It was 1/3000 of a mile, called the Bereh, which was said to be 1/24000 the circumference of the earth. Now this latter fraction corresponds to one-thousandth of an hour of longitude, or of 15 degrees on the equator, and thus points to the Bereh being an equatorial, not a meridian mile. It is still extant in the Turkish dominions in Asia. While the modern, as the ancient, Persian Parasang is 1/7200 of the meridian, the Turkish Farsang of 3 Bereh should be 3/24000 = 1/8000 of the equatorial circumference—

1/8000 of 2029·11 yards × 60 × 360 = 5478·6 yards.

This corresponds very closely to the length of the farsang, which is 5483·9 yards. The Bereh, by calculation, is 1826 yards and the Talmudic cubit, 1/3000 of it, = 21·914 inches.

Each then was one 72-millionth of the terrestrial circumference, but the Talmudic cubit was measured on the equator, the Beládi cubit on the meridian.

5. The Black Cubit (Ninth Century)

Many centuries after the institution of the Assyrian great cubit and of the Persian Beládi cubit, another important cubit became a standard of measure in the Moslem caliphate which reigned over the lands of the Eastern great kingdoms.

Under Al-Mamūn, son of Harūn al-Rashid, science was flourishing in the East, while the West was in the dark ages, at least in all the countries unenlightened by the civilisation of the Moors of Spain. Of Christian Europe, Provence and the other Occitanian countries alone had that light, a light that shone over other countries until extinguished by the Albigensian crusade.

‘Mahmd Ibn Mesoud says that in the time of Almamon (the learned Calife of Babylon) by the elevation of the pole of the equator, they measured the quantity of the degree upon the globe of the earth, and found it to be 56-2/3 miles, every mile containing 4000 cubits, and each cubit 24 digits, and every digit 6 barleycorns, and every barleycorn 6 hairs of a camel’ (‘A Discourse of the Romane Foot and Denarius,’ by John Greaves, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford, 1647).

From this determination of 56-2/3 meridian miles to the degree of longitude it would appear, (1) that the measurement was made at about 20·1°; south of Mecca, (2) that the meridian mile was still of 4000 Egyptian common cubits or 1000 Egyptian fathoms.

It was then probably after this measurement that Al-Mamūn instituted his new Cubit, sometimes known as the Black cubit, so named from the black banner and dress adopted by the Abbaside caliphs.

This new cubit was not, directly at least, of geodesic basis. The caliph was probably inspired by the idea of making in a reasonable manner the alteration which the ancient Egyptians had done badly in making their seven-palm cubit out of simple proportion to the common cubit. So the new cubit had palms and digits of the same length as the common cubit. But it had all the inconveniences of the factor seven. Perhaps Al-Mamūn may have thought that the addition of a seventh palm was not only a homage to the seven planets but that it was satisfactory to lengthen the common cubit in the ratio of the degree of latitude to that of longitude in a part of his dominions where the ratio was exactly 7 to 6. This is the ratio at Alexandria, in 31° N.

Two-thirds of this cubit were taken for

The Black foot = 14·186 inches, divided into 16 digits of the 24 digits or qiráts of the cubit.

This cubit and foot are still in use. The old nilometer on the island of Al-Rauzah (Rode) near Cairo has its scale in cubits of this standard, and measurement of the worn scale gives 21·29 inches for the cubit.

The cubit and foot of Al-Mamūn are the basis of measures and of weights which spread from Egypt to every country in Europe.

The story of the five cubits, ancient and medieval, has shown that they were all derived, directly or indirectly, from the meridian measurement of the earth, some of them being probably instituted with the desire to make them representative of the relation of latitude and longitude.

I venture to say that every measure and weight used throughout the world has been developed from one of these cubits and thus, more or less directly, from the Egyptian meridian cubit. The Republican system of France is but a decimal imitation of the system based on the common Egyptian meridian cubit; its basis being the kilometre, 1/10000 of the quarter-meridian, instead of the Egyptian meridian mile, 1/(90 × 60) of the quarter-meridian.

There were some other cubits of minor importance; one of them is the Hashími cubit described in [Chapter XVII].

Comparative Lengths of the Five Ancient Cubits

[2]. Plutarch speaks of the mystic connexion assumed by the Egyptians between the 28 cubits maximum rise of the Nile and the same number of days in the lunar month.

[3]. The royal cubit is sometimes called the Philiterian cubit; this name (apparently meaning ‘royal’) is used by the later Hero of Alexandria, who wrote about 430. But Herodotus says, ‘They call the pyramids after a herdsman Philition who at that time grazed his herds about that place’; so it is probable that the name came from some legend.

[4]. Διάφραγμα τῆς ὀικουμένης. Instituted by Dicæarchus 310 B.C., corrected by Eratosthenes 276-196.

CHAPTER III
THE STORY OF THE TALENTS

It has been seen that throughout the ancient Eastern Kingdoms, from soon after 5000 B.C. to some centuries after our era, there was general unity in the system of linear measures. It will now be seen that there was similar unity in the system of weights and measures, all derived from some well-known linear standard cubed. In modern times this unity is much less apparent, but yet it can be traced, and it survives with little change in the great part of the world where the English system of weights and measures remains as an inheritance from the most ancient epochs of civilisation.

The 400 shekels of silver, currency of the merchants, that Abraham weighed to Ephron about 1900 years B.C. were probably of about the same weight as 400 half-crowns of the present day.

When Moses levied 100 talents and 1775 shekels, at the rate of half a shekel on each of the 603,550 men who were numbered (Exod. xxxviii.), the weight of the silver shekels can be precisely ascertained.

603550/2 = 301,775 shekels = 100 talents and 1775 shekels.

The Talent was the weight of an Egyptian royal cubic foot of water and was divided into 3000 shekels.

The royal foot, 2/3 of the cubit, = 13·76 inches.

The foot cubed = 2605 cubic inches; 2605/27·73 = 93·9 lb. as the calculated weight of the standard afterwards known as the Alexandrian talent.[^[5]]

The actual weight was 93·65 lb. = 655·550 grains; 655550/3000 = 218·5 grains was the weight of the shekel, nearly our half-ounce—exactly the half-ounce of Plantagenet times, and very near to the weight of our half-crown, which weighs 218·18 grains.

The difference between calculated weight and the actual weight determined from coin or other standards, from trustworthy historical statements and other sources of information or of evidence, is generally due to the great difficulty in constructing accurately the cubical vessel used to ascertain the weight of a cubed measure of water. A difference of 2/100 of an inch in the sides of the vessel made to hold a royal cubic foot of water would make a difference of about 3 parts in 1000, of 4-1/2 of the 1500 ounces or double-shekels of water it contained. And we do not know the temperature of the water used.

From the ancient and medieval cubits were derived all the weights and measures of medieval and modern civilisation, largely through the medium of the talents derived from these standards.

1. The Alexandrian Talent

The standard of this talent has been already given as 93·65 lb., which × 7000 = 655,550 grains.

It was divided on different systems:

1. By the Chaldæans and Egyptians into 60 minás, divided—

(a) On the Chaldæan system into 60 shekels of 182 grains, with a quarter-shekel = 45-1/2 grains.

(b) On the Phœnician, and Hebrew, system into 50 shekels of 218-1/2 grains, with a quarter-shekel = 54·6 grains.

2. By the Greek-Egyptians into 120 minás (or the half or lesser talent into 60 minás) of 100 drachmæ = 54·6 grains.

3. By the Romans into 125 libræ of 12 unciæ (1500 ounces) further divided by the Greeks into 8 drachmæ = 54·6 grains.

Three of these modes of division give a drachma of 54·6 grains. So a Phœnician or Hebrew shekel, a Ptolemaïc tetradrachm and a Roman half-ounce, are of the same weight, differing by only 1/4 grain from our half-ounce, and by only 1/2 grain from our half-crown.

The Alexandrian talent was the Hebrew Kikkar or talent of the sanctuary. In the Chaldæan kingdom the standard measure was the Egyptian royal cubit, and the standard weight was the talent derived from its foot; but the miná appears to have been divided into 60 instead 50 shekels.

The words which Belshazzar saw written on the wall referred to the miná and shekel, or tekel, of this talent. Their meaning may be thus rendered:

Mene, a miná—the great King Nabupalasur, founder of the new Chaldæan Kingdom.

Mene, a miná—the great King Nabukudurusur, son of the preceding.

Tekel, a shekel (of 4 quarters)—Nabunahid (Belshazzar) and his three predecessors, all of small account.

Upharsin, a division, perhaps 2 half-shekels, the Medes and Persians. Or it may simply be the Parsīs or Persians, the enemies at the gate.

This talent is still extant at Bássora (in Chaldæa) as the mánd sofi = 93·22 lb.

The Medimnos.

This was the measure made to hold an Alexandrian talent of wheat. The cubed Egyptian royal foot (probably used as a fluid measure) was increased in the Southern water-wheat ratio of 1 : 1·22. Thus 2605 c.i. × 1·22 = 3176 c.i. and 3176/277·4 = 11·45 gallons as the contents of the Medimnos.

This measure was adopted by the Romans, as well as by the Greeks, as the basis of their corn-measures, doubtless in consequence of the corn-trade from Egypt. A sixth part of it was the Roman Modius.

The Medimnos was divided by the Greeks into 48 Choinix, or into 96 Xestes (L. sextarius) = 0·95 Imperial pint or 19 fluid ounces.

2. The Lesser Alexandrian or Ptolemaïc Talent

This was half of the ordinary or greater talent.

Half the calculated weight of the greater talent gives 46·956 lb. for the lesser. But the actual weight was somewhat less, 46·82 lb.

It was divided into 60 Ptolemaïc miná = 5462 grains, and the miná into 100 drachms. The drachm = 54·62 grains and the tetradrachm = 218·5 grains coincide as coin-weights with the quarter-shekel and shekel of the greater talent.

The miná was divided also on the Roman uncial system:

1/12 = an ounce = 455·28 grs.; of this

1/12 = a double-scruple = 37·94 grs.; of this

1/12 = a carat of 3·1616 grs.

The carat 1/144 ounce, is exactly, to 1/100 grain, the jeweller’s carat of to-day in European countries.

What could be the reason for this talent?

Its miná was half an Alexandrian miná; its drachm was a quarter-shekel.

Don V. V. Queipo[^[6]] considered that the half Beládi cubit had been produced from it by involution, taking the side of a cubical vessel containing half an Alexandrian talent of water and then doubling this new foot to make a new cubit. Its water-volume = 1302·5 c.i. gives as cube root 10·9207 inches, almost exactly half the Beládi cubit = 21·888 inches. But the Beládi cubit being 1/7200 of a Parasang is sufficient evidence of its origin. I consider that the close coincidence of the half-cubit with the side of a cubic vessel containing an Alexandrian half-talent of water led the Ptolemies to institute this smaller talent, as if it had been evolved from the Beládi foot in the same way that the Greek-Asiatic talent had been evolved from the Persian foot or half-cubit.

3. The Greek-Asiatic Talent

After the institution of the great Assyrian or Persian cubit a new talent was necessarily evolved from it.

The Persian foot, half of the cubit, was cubed, and the weight of this cubic foot of water was the Persian or Greek-Asiatic talent—

25·26/2 = 12·63 inches; 12·63³ = 2014 c.i. = 72·61 lb.

The actual weight of this talent (as in the case of the Alexandrian talent) was somewhat less. It corresponded to a cubic foot of 2000 c.i., giving 72·13 lb. = 504,910 grains. This was divided into 60 minás—

(72·13 lb. × 1000)/60 = 8415 grams = 1·2 lb.

The miná was divided by the Persians into 100 darics = 84·15 grains. The actual weight of silver darics found, 83·73 grains, corresponds almost exactly to this weight.

This is the talent Herodotus used when estimating the revenue of the Persian empire. Its miná has survived as the Attári or Assyrian rotl = 8426 grains, extant in Algeria. Another Attári pound = 8320 grains is still used at Bássora, near the Persian gulf. The ounce of this rotl, 8426/16 = 526·6 grains, is exactly the Russian ounce.

The Persian coins weighing 129-130 grains usually called darics are staters or Greek didrachms.

The Metretes

The second Greek standard of capacity was the Metretes.

While the Medimnos contained an Alexandrian talent of wheat, the Metretes contained a Greek-Asiatic talent of it.

The capacity of the Persian cubic foot was 2000 c.i. = 72·13 lb. = 7·213 gallons.

This cubic foot, increased in water-wheat ratio, gives 7·213 × 1·22 = 8·8 gallons or 70·4 pints, as the capacity of the Amphoreus metretes.[^[7]]

Some archæologists have given it as = 8·68 gallons, a very slight difference.

The Metretes was divided into 36 Choinix or 72 Xestes, which contained O·977 pint as against the O·955 pint of the Xestes, which was 1/96 Medimnos. A mean figure, 0·96 pint, is usually taken as the common capacity of the two Xestes.

The Greeks had thus two standards of capacity, the Metretes and the Medimnos, both cubic feet increased in water-wheat ratio to make them corn-measures. It is very likely that, having these two measures from different sources, the one of 72 Xestes, the other of 96, they would use the smaller as a fluid measure. In modern measures there are several instances of corn-measures having become wine-measures. Our Imperial gallon used for fluids is a slightly altered corn-gallon; at present the multiples above the gallon are used for corn, the gallon and its divisions for fluids.

4. Roman Weights and Measures of Capacity

Used by the Greek colonies in Asia, the Greek-Asiatic talent passed to the Greek or Trojan colonies in South Italy, and became the source of the old Roman pound, the As libralis = 5049 grains, 1/100 of the talent; (72·13 × 7000)/100 = 5049 grains.[^[8]]

The Aes or As, the bronze or copper pound of the Roman republic in its earlier times, was divided into 12 ounces, each = 420·75 grains.

It remained the mint-pound of both Republic and Empire.

The Aurei of Julius Caesar, 1/40 As, weigh 127 grains, those of Augustus 125 grains. The mean weight appears to be about 126 grains, which gives 5040 grains for the As.

The Aurei of the later Empire were struck at 1/72 As, and weigh 70 grains, giving the same weight, 5040 grains, for the As. At 70·1 grains they would give 5049 grains, the calculated weight of the As.

The evolution of the As from the Greek-Asiatic talent leads to consideration of the measures connected with it, and with the Alexandrian talent.

It has been seen that the Roman foot, 1/5000 of the Roman mile, 8 Olympic stadia, was 11·67 inches. This foot being cubed, the weight of the cubic foot of water was made the basis of the Roman measures of capacity—

11·67³ inches = 1589 c.i. = 57·32 lb. water

= 401,240 grains.

This calculated measure, 57·32 lb. = 5·732 gallons = 45·8 pints, was the Amphora Quadrantal, supposed to weigh, of wine, 80 As or primitive pounds. Quadrantal vinei octoginta pondo sit. The correspondence was only approximate. The Quadrantal should have been = 57·7 lb. for its 1/80 part (= 5049 grains) to correspond with the As. Its capacity was probably adjusted so as to make it half a Medimnos and = 3 Modii.

There are specimens extant of the Quadrantal, of cubical shape, showing that it was named from its being a cubic foot in measure.

The Quadrantal, being equal to 45·8 pints, was almost exactly half the Greek Medimnos, equal to 91·5 pints; so that, divided into 8 congii, each of 6 sextarii, the Sextarius, 1/48 Quadrantal, was practically the same as the Xestes, 1/96 of the Medimnos.

And the Quadrantal being also very nearly two-thirds of the Greek Metretes, equal to 70·4 pints, the Sextarius was also nearly the same as the other Xestes, 1/72 of the Metretes.

So the Sextarius was 1/48 Quadrantal, 1/72 Metretes, and 1/96 Medimnos.

The relation of the Roman Modius to the Alexandrian-Greek medimnos appears to be only a coincidence, as the former is one-third of a Roman cubic foot, and the latter an Alexandrian cubic foot increased in water-wheat ratio.

The New Roman Pound

Trade with Egypt led the Romans, not only to use the Alexandrian medimnos, but also to put aside the As for commercial purposes and adopt a standard taken from the Alexandrian talent. Its 1500 double-shekels made 125 libræ each of 12 unciæ = 437 grains. The libra was thus = 5244 grains as compared with the As = 5049 grains.

A further uncial division of the libra made the Uncia either of 6 sextulæ, 24 scrupuli, 48 oboli, 144 siliquæ, or of 12 semi-sextulæ, 144 siliquæ.

The siliqua was a little less than the Eastern qirát, being 3·03 grains instead of the 3·1616 grain carat of the Ptolemaïc series of weights.

Table of Roman Weights and Measures of Capacity

Weights

OLD WEIGHTS (MINT SERIES)

NEW WEIGHTS (MEDICINAL SERIES)

Measures

WINE

CORN

5. The Olympic Talent

From the Olympic foot, two-thirds of that most ancient linear standard the common cubit of Egypt and the other Eastern monarchies, a talent was also constructed—

12·16³ in. = 1798 c.i. = 64·81 lb. water = 453,670 grs.

and in practice its actual weight was the same as that calculated.

It was divided in two ways:

1. On the Bosphoric system, which prevailed in Asia Minor, in the Phœnician colonies, and in some parts of Greece, it was divided into 80 miná, each = 5670 grains, and these into 100 drachms of 56·7 grains. Or the Bosphoric miná was divided uncially into 12 ounces of 472·5 grains.

2. On the Euboic system, frequently used in Greek commerce, this talent was divided into 50 minás of 100 drachms.

The drachm = 90·73 grains.

There was also a Euboic talent which coincided with the weight of the Roman Quadrantal, nominally of 80 As weight = 57·7 lb., and in transactions with the East the Romans appear to have called their Quadrantal-weight of water a Euboic talent. But it will presently be seen that this was the Attic monetary talent.

The volume of an Olympic talent of water was 8 times the Hebrew Bath or, for dry goods, Epha.

Comparison of Olympic and Imperial Measures

6. Greek Coin-weights

In ancient Greece as in medieval Europe, financial difficulties led rulers to lower the weight of the coinage. But while in Europe, in England for instance, more pennies were coined from the mint-pound of silver, this remaining fixed, although nominally based on the weight of the sterling, the weights of Greece were actually based on that of the drachma.

When the drachma was diminished in weight, the miná and the talent both dropped proportionately. Thus the standard of the Alexandrian talent, carefully preserved in Egypt, dropped in Greece.

So in Athens, where the Ægina standard was in use, the drachma stood at 93·08 grains when, in 594 B.C., Solon’s Seisachthia law ‘unburdened’ the State and other debtors by decreeing that 73 (or more accurately 72-1/2) drachmæ should now be equal to 100 drachmæ, and altering the coinage accordingly.

This reduced the coin-weights of Athens to—

But commercial weight remained the same. The miná emporikí, the trade miná, was fixed at 138 of the new drachmæ, so that it continued to be 100 of the old drachmæ: 138 × 67·37 = 100 × 93·08 grains.

The commercial miná thus remained at the 600 B.C. standard of 9308 grains = 1·33 lb. and the talent at 79·78 lb.[^[9]]

In settling the reduction of the Attic money-weight at 100 new drachmæ = 73 old drachmæ, Solon probably fixed on the latter figure in order to make the new talent, = 57·74 lb., have approximately the simple ratio of 4 : 5 with the Greek-Asiatic talent—

4/5 × 72·13 lb. = 57·704 lb.

Thus the Roman As being = 5049 grains, 1/100 of the Greek-Asiatic talent, 80 As, = 403,920 grains = 57·7 lb., came to coincide with the Attic monetary talent.

7. The Arabic Talent

To the talents and measures of capacity evolved from the feet of the three principal cubits of antiquity, must be added the talent and other measures evolved from the Black foot of Al-Mamūn’s cubit. They have had great influence on the weights and measures of Europe.

Al-Mamūn’s cubit was = 21·28 inches, the foot = 14·186 inches.

The foot cubed gave a measure of water, the weight of which was the Egyptian Cantar or Cental—

14·1868³ = 2855 c.i. = 102·92 lb. water = 720,441 grs.

This talent was divided in two ways:

1. As the Romans had divided the Alexandrian talent into 125 pounds of 12 ounces, so the new talent was divided into 125 parts each = 5763 grains. This was the Arabic lesser Rotl, its ounce = 480·25 grains. The rotl was also divided in the Greek way into 100 drachms or dirhems = 57·63 grains.

2. Another mode of division was into 100 greater Rotl, thus becoming a Cental of 100 lb. each = 7204·4 grains.

This greater rotl was divided, commercially into 16 ounces (Ar. ukyé, Gr. oggia, L. uncia) of 450,275 grains, and uncially for coin-weight into 12 × 12 dirhems of 50·03 grains.

Both these dirhems became, like the drachma coin-weights of Greece, the bases of other systems of weight, either at their original weight or at the lower weights to which coins might fall.

The Lesser Rotl—

1. With its ounce of 480-1/4 grains would seem to have given rise to the Troy pounds, but it is much more probable that their variable ounces were 10 dirhems of about 48 grains.

2. From 8 of its drachms came the Venetian pound and the German apothecaries’ pound with an ounce of 8 × 57·63 = 461 grains.

From the Greater Rotl came—

1. Eight of its ounces of 450-1/4 grains = the Marc of Cologne, its double being the German Imperial pound = 7218 grains; our royal Tower-pound of Plantagenet times being 12 ounces = 5400 grains.

The 100 lb. centner of North Germany = 103·1 lb. was almost exactly the same weight as Al-Mamūn’s Cantar.

2. Weights of Eastern Europe (see [Chap. XV])

From 8 dirhems of 50 to 47 grains came the ounces of the pounds of Southern France.

From 10 dirhems of 48 grains, more or less, came the ounces of the Troy pounds.

The weight of the dirhem is now: Turkey 49·6 grains, Greece 49·4 grains, Morocco 49 grains, Egypt 47·6 grains, Tripoli 47·07 grains. In Tripoli there is a small weight = 12·55 grains called a dirhem, which seems to be 1/4 of an original weight dirhem = 50·1 grains.

The fall of the dirhem weight, and consequently of the weights which are multiples of it, accounts for the Egyptian Cantar having fallen from its original weight to somewhat over 98 lb.

The quarter-Cantar gave its Arabic name to other quarter-hundredweights, the Arroba of Spain, the Rubbio of Italy, the Rub of Southern France (from Ar. rouba, four; cf. Rubaiyát, quatrain).

Measures of Capacity derived from Arabic Linear
Measures

Al-Mamūn’s cubit cubed became the medieval standard of grain measure on the Mediterranean coasts—

21·28 in. cubed = 9639 c.i. = 347·314 lb. water,

which is equal to 34·73 gallons or 4·34 bushels.

This measure subsists in Egypt as the Rebekeh = 4·32 bushels. It passed to Marseilles as the Cargo, and to Paris as the Setier.

These developments of the Arabic cubit and foot will be more fully explained in the chapters on foreign systems. They are sketched in order to show how the Eastern caliphate took up the system begun by the great monarchies of many centuries before, and elaborated by Greece and Rome. Thus, from Moslem Egypt as from Pharaonic Egypt have come virtually all the weights and measures of the Western world.

[5]. The Imperial pound = 27·727 cubic inches of water, 7000 grains: the gallon 10 lb. or 277·274 c.i.

[6]. Essai sur les Systèmes Métriques (1859).

[7]. The Metretes was one-tenth more than our firkin. In the story of the Marriage at Cana (John ii.) the Greek has ‘two or three metretes.’ This term is kept in Wycliff’s version (1388) and in the modern Dutch version.

[8]. 5050 grs.—Smith’s Dict. of Antiquities. 5047 grs.—Daremberg and Scaglio’s Dict. of Antiquities.

[9]. There was a custom of rhōpi, turn of the scale, or long weight, which increased the legal commercial weight to a customary weight tending towards that of the Alexandrian talent series.

CHAPTER IV
THE INVOLUTION OF LINEAR MEASURES FROM
WEIGHTS

The Sources of the English and of the Rhineland
Foot

Commerce is the great conservator of standards. These may become altered by the ill-advised action of rulers, by municipal or parochial carelessness, even by the desire of profit on short measure, or occasionally, as seen to a slight extent in our old Bushel, by the faulty dimensions of a standard; but wholesale trade, supported, in weights at least, by the goldsmith and the apothecary, preserved the integrity of many standards during the Middle Ages and up to modern times. Commerce conveyed to the West the standards that had developed in the great Oriental Kingdoms, sometimes with the modifications due to Roman influence. Masons and architects also preserved the standards of length and, allowing for variations inevitable under the feudal system, the principal linear measures can generally be traced to their sources as surely as weights. But there are two, yea three, striking exceptions among the linear standards of the West: the English foot, and the Rhineland foot, and also the Pán of Marseilles. These are quite unconnected with any ancient measures, and there is no record of their origin. The only clue to it is found in the simple relation of each to the corresponding weights and measures of capacity, the origin of which can be satisfactorily traced. This leads to the hypothesis that these linear measures were ‘involved,’ that is produced by a method of involution the inverse of that which had evolved the measures of weight and capacity.

1. The English Foot

There seem three hypotheses for the origin of the English foot.

1. That it was the Olympic foot = 12·16 inches, its standard diminished by the accidents of time.

But we know that the Romans established their measures in Britain, and our mile of 8 stadia and of 5000 feet (first Roman, then English) up to Tudor times, shows that it was originally 1000 Roman paces of 5 feet; and our early wine-bushel, of which the wine-gallon was 1/8, is referable to the cube of the English foot, not to that of the Olympic foot.

There is no trace of the Olympic foot in Northern Europe except the possibility (mentioned under Foreign Linear Measures) of the Amsterdam local foot, = 11·146 inches, being 11 inches of the Olympic foot.

2. It happens that the mean of the Roman foot = 11·67 inches, and of the Rhineland foot = 12·356 inches, gives 12·013 inches. But there is no instance of a new standard being formed from the mean of two older ones; moreover this hypothesis begs the question of the Rhineland foot.

3. The hypothesis which I consider the most likely is that the foot is the measure of the side of a cubical vessel containing 1000 Roman ounces of water. It seems likely that in early times, possibly under King Alfred by the advice of Italian moneyers or Jewish merchants, this measurement was effected in order to establish a foot and a cubic foot measure of capacity corresponding to a new talent of 1000 Roman ounces. There is no record of this, any more than there is a record of the standard taken for the Tower pound of the Norman and Plantagenet kings. All we know is that, during the times of these kings, the relation of Averdepois or Roman weight to our measures of capacity was utterly ignored until at last, in 1685, ‘some Gentlemen at Oxford determined the weight of a cubic foot of spring water, or 1728 solid inches, to be 1000 ounces averdepois.’ That the correct weight is not 1000 but about 998 ounces at 62° does not militate against the connexion of the weight and measure any more than the fact that a cubic decimetre of water, supposed to weigh 1000 grammes, only weighs about 998-1/2 grammes would disprove a connexion between the cubic decimetre and the gramme.

The difficulty of making a ‘quadrantal,’[^[10]] a vessel of exactly cubical form inside, is so great that the wardens of the Metric System abandoned the cubic decimetre of water as giving the standard, either of the litre for capacity, or of the kilogramme for weight. Even approximate accuracy was unattainable, and they were obliged to make the kilogramme an arbitrary standard of mass and the litre a vessel containing a kilogramme of water.

When it is seen that a difference of 1 in 2500 in the length of the foot taken as the inside measure of a quadrantal makes a difference of 3 cubic inches out of 1728 in its capacity, the material difficulties of constructing a vessel exactly cubical will be understood. However, a quadrantal being constructed, perhaps after many trials of sides as exactly equal as possible, and holding 1000 ounces of Roman ounces (= 437 grains) of water, the mean measure of its panels was taken as a foot, and the quadrantal as a cubic foot—the wine-bushel.

Let us take 1000 Roman ounces and divide the total number of grains weight by the statute number of grains in a cubic inch of water as determined by Captain Kater in 1824.

The dividend will be the number of cubic inches, and its cube root will be the foot—

437,000/252,458 = 1729·8 cubic inches,

of which the cube root is 12·0042 inches, a length differing by only 1/2400 from the actual Imperial foot.

I took the idea of this hypothesis from that by which Don V. V. Queipo inferred the Beládi cubit to be the double measure of the side of a cubical vessel containing a Ptolemaïc talent of water. Certainly it solves the question of the origin of our foot, and it happens that, applied to the equally obscure origin of the Rhineland foot, the results are equally satisfactory.

2. The Rhineland Foot

Let the same process of involution be applied to the side of a cubical vessel containing 1000 Troy ounces of water.

The standard of Troy weight varied very much, from the Danish value of a little over 481 grains in the ounce, to the French Troy value of 472·13 grains.

The Scots Troy weight, = 476·09 grains to the ounce, is nearly the same as the Amsterdam weight, = 476·68 grains.

These Troy weights may be taken at three main standards, high, medium, and low, represented by:

Let us apply to 1000 ounces of water, at the medium Amsterdam standard, = 10 Egyptian dirhems of 47·6 grains, the same measurement of a quadrantal made to contain them as exactly as possible.

476·687/252·458 = 1886·9 cubic inches

and the cube root of the dividend gives 12·357 inches, exactly, to 1 in 20,000, the Rhineland foot as established in Prussia = 12·3564 inches. The Prussian standard of the Cologne pound (its ounce = 451·1 grains) was 1/66 of a Rhineland cubic foot of water at 65·75 F., and was fixed at 7217·9 grains. This was exactly 1/66 of 1000 Troy ounces of water at the standard of 476·38 grains. So 66 Prussian pounds were equal to 1000 Troy ounces, or to 62·5 Troy pounds at that standard.

The Rhineland cubic foot had, like the English cubic foot, long been the bushel standard of North Germany. The Himt, now, or until quite recently, the unit of corn-measure in Hanover and Brunswick, contained 6·852 gallons, or 68·52 lb. of water. It is probable that the Himt, which passed to Scotland in the fifteenth century as the firlot of that time, had risen slightly, and that it was originally = 68·05 lb., the true Rhineland cubic foot of water.

3. The Pán of Marseilles

Marseilles, a city of Greek origin, always in extensive commercial relations with the Mediterranean countries using the Arabic system of weights and measures, had an almost perfect system of its own, entirely sexdecimal, and dating from about the tenth century. This system is still extant, so far as the French law can be evaded (see [Chap. XXI]: Old Weights and Measures of France). Wine and corn measures were in the usual Southern water-wheat ratio of 1 to 1·22, and the principal of these was the Escandau for wine and oil, and the Panau for corn. Now Escandau means ‘standard’; and this measure was 1/4 of the Mieirolo, the half wine-load or ‘wey’ which corresponded in water-wheat ratio to the half-load or wey of wheat. The load of wheat, the cargo, was the cubic cubit of Al-Mamūn, brought from Egypt by the corn-trade. The unit of length was the Pan (pronounced páng), a word apparently similar to the palmo of Italy and Spain, but really different. Palmo becomes paume in Provençal, while Pan is from L. pannus, a side, pane or panel;[^[11]] and the Marseilles Pan = 9·9 inches is exactly the measure of the side or pan of an Escandau of cubical form. The filiation of the Escandau is evident, while the Pan is not derived from any antecedent measure. That the Pan was the measure of the pan or panel of a cubical Escandau is supported by the name of the corn-standard, the Panau, corresponding to the fluid standard of the Escandau, and of the land-measure, L. Panalata, the peck-land, originally the extent usually sown with a Panau of wheat.

Escandau = 16·096 litres = 3·54 gallons.

∛16096 = 25·24 centimetres, the Pan = 9·9 inches.

The evidence of the Pan seems to me to remove any doubt as to the medieval evolution of linear measures from imported standards of weight or capacity. The meaning of Pan as ‘side, panel’ is conclusive, especially when supported by the Panau measure and by other Provençal derivatives:

Panard, a limping man, leaning to one side as he walks.

Lou Panard, the star Antares which, rising late and setting early, not appearing much above the horizon, is visible only on one side of it.

4. The Filiation of the English Foot, of the
Rhineland Foot, and of the Marseilles Pan

In the description of the ancient cubits and talents and of the Roman system derived from them, the filiation of the English system of weights and measures, and of the Scots and other cognate systems, is clearly seen. There was no taking of a King’s heel-to-toe as a foot, no pound imported from some unknown country at an unknown period, no wheat-quarter preserved in the dimensions of an Egyptian sarcophagus, not even a pint from the Roman sextarius; legend disappears, the course of evolution, and, at one point, of involution, is clear, and as thoroughly scientific as in any system invented by an Academy of Sciences. Here are the links of filiation of the English foot:

1. The Egyptian meridian cubit.

2. The royal cubit, increased from the meridian cubit.

3. The royal foot, two-thirds of the royal cubit.

4. The cubic royal foot.

5. The Alexandrian talent, the weight of a royal cubic foot of water.

6. The Roman ounce, 1/1500 of the Alexandrian talent.

7. The English talent, 1000 Roman ounces.

8. The volume of 1000 Roman ounces of water, the original wine-bushel.

9. The 1000-ounce Quadrantal becomes the cubic foot, its side giving the English foot.

For the Rhineland and Scots system we have:

1. The Egyptian meridian cubit.

2. The Arabic or Black cubit, 7 palms of the meridian cubit’s 6 palms.

3. The Arabic foot, two-thirds of the Arabic cubit.

4. The Arabic talent or Cantar, the weight of an Arabic cubic foot of water.

5. The Troy ounce, 1/1500 of the Cantar, and coinciding with 10 lesser dirhems of about 48 grains.

6. The Rhineland talent of 1000 Troy ounces Amsterdam standard.

7. The Quadrantal containing 1000 Troy ounces of water becomes the cubic Rhineland foot, its side giving the measure of the Rhineland foot.

For the Provençal system we have:

1. The Egyptian meridian cubit.

2. The Arabic cubit, 7 palms of the meridian cubit’s 6 palms.

3. The Arabic cubit cubed, in the corn-measure of medieval Egypt, the Cargo of Marseilles, the Setier of Paris.

4. The half-cargo reduced to wine-measure in wheat-water ratio becomes the Mieirolo; of which one-fourth is the Escandau or Standard measure.

5. The Quadrantal containing an Escandau gives, as the measure of its side or panel, the Pán of Marseilles.

The evolution of the English foot, of the Rhineland or Scots foot, of the Pán of Marseilles, being now made clear, we can proceed to English and other linear measures. The origin of the Ounce, the foot, the cubic foot or wine-bushel is explained. That of Troy weight has been seen, and its predecessor, Tower weight, came from another ounce of the Arabic cantar. The origin of every measure and weight used in the civilised world will be found in the stories of the ancient cubits and talents.

[10]. Quadrantal, the Roman standard of capacity, a cubic vessel measuring one foot on each of its inside panels.

[11]. The French word pan has the same meaning, while Fr. empan, a span, is a corruption of espan.

CHAPTER V
ENGLISH LINEAR MEASURES

1. The Yard, the Foot, the Inch

The term Yard, the Old English ‘gerde’ or ‘yerde,’ a wand or rod, became specially applied to a wand of 3 feet, or 4 spans; from this double mode of division and from its convenient length the cloth-yard of 3 feet became generally used. It has the convenience of being a half-fathom, and of being divisible not only into feet and inches, but also sexdecimally into units which are familiar as limb-lengths of the cubit and span system.

The half-yard corresponds to the Cubit.

The quarter-yard is a Span.[^[12]]

The eighth is a Finger; women constantly measure linen approximately by the length of the bent middle finger.

The sixteenth is a Nail; this is the length of the half-finger, the last two joints of the middle finger.[^[13]]

While the yard is lawfully divided into halves, quarters, eighths, and nails, it may also, as a measure of 3 feet, be divided into 36 inches. Yard-measures are usually divided in both ways, on one side into 16 nails, on the other into inches.

It is customary to say either a yard and a quarter, or 45 inches, or 3 feet 9 inches. Or to say either 58 inches or 4 feet 10 inches; but it is not customary to say a yard and 22 inches. We cease to use the yard as unit when we cannot express its fractions sexdecimally.

The Foot is lawfully divided into 12 inches; but there is nothing to prevent it being divided decimally, or otherwise, as convenient.

The Inch is divided according to convenience, either

Sexdecimally, into halves, quarters, &c., down to sixty-fourths. This is the usual division.

Duodecimally, into 12 lines.

Decimally, into tenths and hundredths.

Steel foot-rules usually show all three of these scales.

Some trades may have special scales. Thus type-founders divide the Inch into 6 ‘picas’ each = 2 lines, and the ‘pica’ into 12 points each = 1/6 line or 1/72 inch. Nonpareil type is 6 points; Brevier is 8 points.

2. Standards of the Linear Measures

Tables of measures, from the earliest, about 1500, down to quite recent times, usually began by stating that ‘Three barley-corns make an inch’ or that ‘Geographical measures begin at a barley-corn and increase upward to a league,’ &c.

King David I of Scotland (c. 1150) is credited with the pronouncement that the Scots inch was to be the mean measure of ‘the thowmys of iij men, that is to say an mekill man and a man of messurabil statur and of a lytell man. The thoums are to be messurit at the rut of the nayll.’ But no more in Scotland than in England, or elsewhere, has the inch ever been anything but a division of the foot.

A standard of the English foot was fixed in Old St. Paul’s Church, London, and was known as Paul’s foot, all measures being referred to the standard ‘qui insculpitur super basim columpnæ in ecclesia Sancti Pauli.’ In 1273 a deed gave the measurement of land ‘according to the iron ell [yard] of the King’s palace.’

The present standard yard is a bronze bar kept in London, the length of which agrees exactly with the yard, still extant, of Tudor times. A set of standard measures of length is fixed along the base of the northern wall of Trafalgar Square,[^[14]] and another set is in the flooring of the Guildhall. Sets are also fixed to public buildings in several chief towns of the United Kingdom.

As metal rods vary in length according to temperature, comparisons with a standard measure should be made at the normal temperature of 62°. But there is an alloy of steel and nickel (42 per cent.), named Invar, which is not perceptibly affected by temperature.

A pendulum beating seconds at sea-level and at normal temperature measures 39·1393 inches at Greenwich (Act of Parliament, 1824). This length varies in different places from the variations of gravity due to the ellipticity of the earth and local causes of deviation.

3. The Hand

The popular ‘hand’ was the ‘palm’ of ancient times, four digits or finger-breadths.

Pes habet palmos iv, palmus habet digitos iv (Frontinus).

‘Foure graines of barlye make a finger; foure fingers a hande; foure handes a foote’ (Eden, 1566).

But the present Hand for horse-measurement is ‘the measure called a Handful used in measuring the height of horses, by 27 Hen. 8, Chap. 6, ordained to be 4 inches’ (Sam. Leake, 1701). This is part of an old popular duodecimal division of the foot into 3 hands of 4 inches, then of the inch into 3 barleycorns (lengthwise) each of 4 poppy-seeds, and of these again into 12 hairbreadths.

In Austria this horse-measure is the Faust or fist.

Another very widely spread limb-measure is that of the fist with the thumb projecting, roughly = 6 inches. It is the Shaftment of some parts of England, scæft-mund (shaft-hand) in Old English, bawd in Wales; the somesso of Italy, the kubdeh of Egypt, the taim of Burma.

In the Laws of Æthelstan (1000) a measurement is given as 9 feet, 9 shaftments, and 9 barleycorns, i.e. 9 feet + 9 half-feet + 3 inches.

4. The Ell

The yard, being 4 spans, was formerly one of the Ells, measures of 3, 4, 5 or more spans, related to the cubit of 2 spans. The Scots yard, of 37 inches, was always known as an Ell, and it was only gradually that our yard took the place, for cloth measure, of the Ell of 5 spans = 45 inches, which was long maintained by statute. The yard and the ell were usually distinguished as virga and ulna in statutes, but sometimes ulna meant a yard.

Both yard and ell were divided into halves, quarters, and nails (sixteenths).

See [Chap. XVI] (The Ells), and [Chap. XX] (section on the Nail and the Clove).

5. The Rod, Furlong, Mile, and League

The earliest table of English linear measures is probably that in Arnold’s ‘Customs of London,’ c. 1500.

The lengith of a barly corne iij tymes make an ynche

and xij ynches make a fote

and iij fote make a yerde

and v quatirs of the yarde make an elle

v fote make a pace

cxxv pace make a furlong

and viij furlong make an English myle.

Thus, in 1500, the furlong was 125 × 5 = 625 feet, and the mile = 5000 feet = 1666·6 yards.

The mile was originally the Roman mile, 1000 paces or 5000 Roman feet, and = (5000 × 11·67)/(3 × 12) in. = 1621-1/3 yards. So in course of time our mile had become 5000 English feet.

But the linear unit for land measurement was not, as in the Roman system, a pertica or rod of 10 or 12 feet; it became very early, on the Teutonic system, a rod of 16 feet, with varieties, under French influence later on, of 18, of 21 and 24 feet.

In early Plantagenet times, not later than Edward I, the statute rod was fixed at 5-1/2 yards or 16-1/2 feet. Thus, while the rood, that is the field-furlong, was 40 rods or perches of 16-1/2 feet = 660 feet, the itinerary furlong, 1/8 mile, remained 625 feet, ‘xxxviij perchis sauf ij fote’ (Arnold’s ‘Chronicle’). This clashing of the new statute rod, and its multiple the rood or field-furlong of 40 rods, with the ancient itinerary furlong now only = 37·87 rods, was rectified in Tudor times, probably temp. Henry VII, but definitely by a statute of Elizabeth which raised the furlong to coincide with the rood. The mile thus became of its present length, 8 furlongs of 40 rods of 5-1/2 yards = 1760 yards = 5280 feet. The mile has then successively been:

For long measurements chains came into use, and shortly after 1600 Edward Gunter introduced, for surveying purposes, measurement by a chain of 4 rods, i.e. a ‘brede’ or ‘acre-brede,’ the breadth of an acre of 40 × 4 rods, divided into 100 links.

So the multiples of the yard are now:

The Scots mile and the Irish mile were equally 8 furlongs of 40 rods, but Scots and Irish rods (see [Chap. XIV]).

The term Yard has been used for certain large land-measures. These, with the evolution of the Rod, will be given in the next chapter.

The League

It has been seen that the Persian Parasang was three meridian miles, or 3000 Olympic fathoms. France retains this as the lieue marine of 20 to the degree, and Southern France long retained a league of 3 miles each of 1000 toises or cannes. But in Roman times the Leuca or Leuga of Gaul was 1-1/2 Roman miles. It passed to medieval England at about the same length, being defined as duodecim quaranteinis, 12 furlongs or roods of 40 rods.

[12]. The usual dimensions of bricks are a span by a half-span, by a nail.

[13]. The story of the Nail will be found in [Chap. XX].

[14]. The Standards Commission in 1870 advised that the public standards of length should be placed so as to be readily accessible to the public without their use ‘being disturbed by passers or idle gazers.’ Anyone who has tried to get access to those in Trafalgar Square may regret that there seems to be no provision made against their site being made the usual lounge of often very objectionable persons.

CHAPTER VI
LAND-MEASURES

1. Introduction

The first measures of land were seed-measures. They are found in every country; they become fixed in course of time as the idea of geometric measurement arises; they survive in name giving the peasant a concrete idea of the extent of his fields.

Then came the estimation of land by the amount of ploughing, or sometimes of hand-digging, that could be done in a day, and by the extent that could be cultivated with a pair of oxen. Then came a system of geometric measurement, fixing the former seed-units or labour-units by measures of length and breadth, and finally the abstract idea of superficial area. These different systems have succeeded one another everywhere and in all time.

1. Seed-units.—The land that could be sown with a certain measure of seed-corn, wheat being the usual standard: Fr. seterée, estrée, boisselée, &c.; It. moggio; Sp. fanega; G. scheffel; Nor. tunn-land. These names correspond to corn-measures.

2. Day’s hand-labour units.—The land that could be tilled with spade or hoe in a day: the ‘Daieswork,’ about 10 square rods; Fr. hommée, ouvrée—20 square rods of vineyard.

3. Day’s ploughing units.—L. jugerum; It. giornata; Fr. journal, arpent; G. morgen, joch, acker; Du. bouw; Hind. bigha; Ar. feddan; Ir. ardagh. All about an English acre more or less.

4. Oxgang units.—The land that a boor with a yoke of oxen could keep in husbandry; about 7 acres of arable, about 30 acres including wood and pasture:

Yard-land; Du. hoeve. A group of oxgangs, generally of four yoke, made a Ploughland; Prov. un mas de quatre couble, a four-yoke farm.

5. Geometric units.—First, units of a certain shape based on the customary length of the furrow: Rood, 40 rods by 1 rod broad; Fr. vergée, seillon. Then small units of a square rod, the rod being of customary length; with large units, usually groups of roods, vergées, &c. Four roods side by side make the English or the Norman acre. A rood square or square furlong is the ‘acreme’ or 10-acre field.

Legal units of land were usually abstract, of so many square rods or fathoms, independently of any customary shape.

2. Evolution of Geometric Land-measures

While smaller units, such as the superficial rod, can easily be conceived as square, the larger arable units have, or have had, a peculiar form which still attaches to them. The peasant, whose mind’s eye can perceive the square rod or toise or verge, refers the rood or the acre, the vergée or the arpent, to the familiar length of the furrow and to the breadth of the rod or of the four-rod acre-breadth equal to a cricket-pitch. These lengths and breadths will long be his essentially concrete standards of field-measurement.

While some legal units of surface have recognised the customary furrow-length as an element of this form, others have always been undefined as to form.

In ancient Egypt the land was surveyed by the state, not only for revenue purposes, but because of the Nile overflow effacing the land-marks usual in other countries.

‘Hence land-measuring appears to me to have had its beginning, and to have passed over to Greece’ (Herodotus). The agrarian unit of Egypt, called by the Greeks aroura, a plough-land, was a square, each side being a Khet or cord, of 100 royal cubits = 172 feet or 57-1/3 yards. The square khet is represented by the present Egyptian feddan al risach of 20 lesser qasáb (each 20 × 4 Hashími cubits) = 170·4 feet square = 2/3 acre.

Ten square khet made the usual land-holding. This unit, = 6·79 acres, corresponds closely to 10 modern feddan, to the véli or oxgang unit of Southern India, and to the 7 acres of arable in the medieval English boor’s yard-land. That the ancient Egyptian oxgang was 10 khets in a line, giving if required a furrow of 573 yards easy in muddy alluvial soil, seems certain, for its hieroglyphic is a line of ten small squares. This is exactly the primitive form of the English acre, 10 × 1 chains.

In ancient Greece the unit of land-measure was the plethron of 10 rods (kalamoi) each of 10 Olympic feet, = 101·33 English feet. Had it a concrete agrarian form? Evidently the square plethron (= 0·235 acre or nearly a rood) was much too short for a plough-unit; but the larger unit was the tetragyon, i.e. a four-rood field, and with the four square plethra end-on-end, this Greek acre afforded a furrow-length of 135 yards. So it is probable that the tetragyon, 135 × 33-3/4 yards, = 0·94 acre, was the usual concrete agrarian unit.

A common size of land-holding was 12 × 12 = 144 plethra, = about 34 acres, a size corresponding to our medieval oxgang.

In ancient Italy land was measured by the Roman decempeda or pertica, the 10-foot perch or rod, = 9·725 feet.

A strip of land 120 × 4 Roman feet made an Actus, probably the breadth of a double furrow, up and down. The square actus, actus quadratus, = 30 acti = 120 × 120 feet, about 50 square rods.

Two square acti made a Jugerum, the day’s work for a yoke of oxen, = 0·623 acre.

Four square acti, bina jugera, made the Heredium, = 1·246 acre.

How were the four square acti arranged? Were they in a square 240 × 240 feet? No doubt that would be the official form of the heredium; but it is probable that, as I have assumed for the Greek tetragyon of 4 square plethra, the 4 Roman acti would be, when convenient, practically arranged in a line, thus giving an agrarian unit of 480 × 120 feet and a furrow of about 160 yards, which is nearly one-tenth of the 5000 feet Roman mile.[^[15]]

The official division of the field was based on the jugerum; this being divided, on the duodecimal or uncial system, into 12 unciæ, each of 24 square perticæ, the latter being the scruples, the qiráts, of the Roman land-ounce. Here we see the uncial system overshadowing the decempeda; for if the jugerum could be divided into 12 ounces of 240 × 10 feet and these into 24 scruples of 10 feet square, each of its two acti might also be divided into 100 sections of 12 feet square, or the double jugerum into 100 sections of 24 feet square. It is probable that this would be a more popular division than that based on the decempeda; for it is certain that a rod of 16 spans = 12 feet was used; it was the Græco-Roman akena (from akis, goad), a gad or rod.

The Heredium passed to Gaul, where it established itself in the north, becoming the French arpent, 100 square perches, each of 6 aunes (= 24 Roman feet) square, so that the arpent is identical with the heredium, and was divided on the plan I have suggested as that of the Roman land-measure. But the arpent rarely coincided with the standard of the Paris government, and both seed-measures and work-measures, of fixed area, were often preferred. Where the coutumes de Normandie are still in almost full force and are cherished by the people, the principal unit of land-measure was, and is still, the Acre de Normandie, containing 160 perches of 24 feet square. The standard of the foot varies; sometimes it is the royal foot, sometimes the Roman foot, retained by the device of taking 11 royal inches for a foot. The ancient standard of this acre is thus expressed in law-Latin: Pertica terræ fecit 24 passus seu soleas pedis; 40 perticæ faciunt virgatam; duæ virgatæ faciunt arpentum; 4 virgatæ faciunt acram. ‘Passus’ is here a foot; but sometimes it meant a pace, half of the Roman pace which is here represented by the brasse of 5 royal feet = 1·624 metre. So in Normandy land-measure the pas = 32 inches and the Caux peasant reckons his vergée as 100 × 20 paces = 88·8 × 17·76 yards. These concrete forms of land-unit are dying out, yet everywhere traces of it can be found in conversation with old peasants.

From the South of France to England and Scotland there is a concrete shape recognisable in the large unit of land-measure. The Provençal Saumado of 1600 square cano or toises, the Normandy acre of 160 square rods of 4 toises, the English acre of 160 square rods of 5-1/2 yards, the Scots acre of 160 square rods of 6 ells = 18·53 feet, are all connected by a common tradition of concrete form, and are all made up of four minor units: sesteirado, vergées, roods, &c. Looking back to the land-measures of Greece and Rome we find this same group of four lesser units in the tetragyon and heredium. The law may only recognise abstract superficial standards, but the peasant holds to the concrete units of form convenient for cultivation.

3. English Land-measures

Notwithstanding Homer’s recommendation of mules as ‘better far than kine to drag the jointed plough,’ oxen are still used in the greater part of the world. In light soils one yoke of oxen is sufficient, but in heavy fallows, with deep-working ploughs, two, three or more yoke were used; and in feudal times it would appear that the four tenants of a hide or ploughland co-operated with their oxen. A furrow of 40 rods could thus be made easily in one breath, and as this length of a rood coincided approximately with the eighth of a mile, that division of the mile was also called a furrow-long or furlong. When ploughing up fallow-land the oxen, on getting to the end of the ‘shot,’ turned and took breath. The ploughman measured a rod-breadth from the first furrow by means of his goad, Scottice by the ‘fall’ of it, and this rod-breadth down which the oxen turned, the tornatura of Italy, was a rood.

Sometimes between the roods a narrow unploughed strip, a balk of land, was left, marking the roods or ‘selions,’ four of which, side by side, made an acre, and forty of which made the square furlong, the ten-acre field.

Ploughing in roods, selions, square furlongs, is still far from extinct. In Brittany land is still reckoned by seillons of so many furrows wide, or of so many gaules or 12-foot rods. In Southern France fields are estimated in breadths of a destre, of the 12-foot rod corresponding roughly to the width cleared by a couple of mowers. In our Isle of Axholme, in North Lincolnshire, land is reckoned in selions of a rod wide and usually of a furlong in length; these selions or roods being grouped into furlongs, that is, actually or originally, into greater units of a square furlong = 40 roods or 10 acres.

Simple country-folk, whose only ideas of land-measure were taken from the length of the ox-goad and of the furrow, and from the breadth of the long acre-strip of land, came slowly to understand that the surface of a field of irregular shape might be reckoned in acres and rods. A statute of Edward II gave a table of the different breadths of the acre when it was less than forty rods or perches in length:

‘When an acre of land containeth ten perches in length, then it shall be in breadth sixteen perches; when it containeth eleven perches in length, then it shall be in breadth fourteen and a half and three-quarters of a foot’—and so on through the different lengths an acre might be.

So people came gradually to abstract the idea of superficial measure from shape and to apply it to land of any figure, however different from a square or a rectangle. Thus measures, always concrete at first and taken from some known object of comparison, became abstract in men’s minds for purposes of calculation. Then came the land-surveyor introducing arithmetic and geometry into the art of measurement, and using the cord or chain instead of the measuring rod; and it was also found that decimal calculation would be an improvement in this art.

For purposes of accurate measurement and calculation, Edward Gunter introduced, nearly three centuries ago, measurement by a chain of a hundred links and twenty-two yards or four rods in length. Its adoption decimalised the land-measures without disturbing them. Ten chains go to a furlong and ten square chains to an acre.

Norden (‘Surveior’s Dialogue,’ 1610) mentions the ‘standard chaine, that is by the chaine of 16-1/2 foote.’ It was soon after this that the chain was increased to 66 feet or 4 rods, which length was a current unit, the ‘brede’ or acre-brede, the breadth of an acre.

Measures of Length and of Surface

In the following table each superficial unit is placed opposite the lineal unit of which it is the square:

It must be remembered that the length of the rod determined the length of the mile and the area of the acre. This is shown in the table on the following page.

British Miles and Acres Derived from Different Rods in Local Usage

Note.—The Scottish rod or ‘fall’ is six Scottish ells or yards. The Scottish and Irish miles have long been practically obsolete. The Lancashire rod and acre, also the Guernsey perch and acre, are the same as the Irish. The Guernsey land-measures are statute locally; the rood or vergée is the customary unit.[^[16]]

A Square Furlong or Ten-Acre Field

Acre No. 1 is divided, according to the ancient custom, into 4 roods, each 40 rods long and 1 rod broad.

Acre No. 10 is divided, according to Gunter’s decimal system, into 10 square chains, each 4 rods square.

4. Feudal Land-Measures

In ancient Egypt land was surveyed by a State department, but other Eastern Kingdoms, even of the present time, are less advanced. There is a simple system of taxing each plough. This was approximately the medieval system, as we see in the Domesday revenue-survey, the great record of the plough-lands and rental of England. Estates are thus described:

2-1/2 hides; land for 1-1/2 ploughs. There is 1 plough with 4 bordars and 4 serfs. Worth 30s.

2 hides, land for 2 ploughs, 30 acres meadow. Worth 60s.

4 hides, 1-1/2 virgates; land for 10 ploughs. Now worth 14 li., formerly at 17 li.

In some parts the ‘knight’s fee’ was reckoned at 480 acres (4 hides) worth 40 shillings a year. On this valuation—

The pound-land, librata terræ, was 240 acres.

The shilling-land, solidata terræ, was 12 acres.

The penny-land, denariata terræ, was 1 acre.

The farthing-land, 1/2 obolata terræ, was 1 rood.

Cent livrées de terre à l’esterlin (Froissart) a hundred pound-lands, reckoned of the annual value of 100 pounds sterling. This is sometimes taken as the amount of ‘relief,’ another feudal estimate, often taken at one year’s value.

In Edward I’s time a son and heir paid £18 for relief of his land which was worth £18 a year. In Henry II’s time £5 appears to be the usual relief paid for a knight’s fee on succession to it. By Magna Charta the relief of a whole barony (10 to 40 knight’s fees) was fixed at 100 marks; in Henry III’s time it was £100.

I may here give a fifteenth-century record of English linear measures.[^[17]]

Nota, for to mesure and mete lande.

It is to mete that iij Early Cornys in the myddis of the Ere makyth one ynche, And xij enchis makyth a foote

And sixteyne foote and a halfe makyth a perche; And in sum cuntre a perche ys xviij foote.

Fourty perchys in lengyth makyth a Rode of Lande; put iiij therto in brede, and that makyth an Acre.

And xiiij Acrys makyth a yerde of lande;

And v yerdis makyth an hyde of lande, which ys lxx Acrys.

And viij hydis makyth a knyghtis fee, which is vC.lx Acrys of lande.

5. Terms used in Land-measures

Rod.—Pole, Perch, Goad, Lug, L. pertica, Fr. perche, verge, G. ruthe, Du. roede.

The equivalent words, L. virga, Fr. verge, A.S. geard, Eng. ‘yard,’ originally any long straight twig or rod, came to mean: (1) a yard or ell-measure, (2) a rod measure of land, lineal or superficial. The French verge is still thus used in Normandy and the Channel Islands. Our ‘yard’ acquired this extended sense, and others still more extended. In Cornwall 2 staves (of 9 feet) make a yard of land. In Somerset the lineal rod is the ‘land-yard,’ and the yard of land is a square rod. Thus the rood is ‘forty yard o’ ground’ and the acre is ‘eight score yard o’ ground.’

Rood.—A differentiated form of ‘rod’ applied in a lineal sense to 40 rods, and also to the area of a quarter-acre 40 × 1 rods.

In Normandy and the Channel Islands our rod and rood are verge and vergée, and as the first sense of verge was ‘yard’ so vergée became in English a ‘yard of lande.’ So here we have a third sense of the triple-form word virga-verge-yard.

‘A rodde of land which some call a roode, some a yarde lande, and some a farthendale’ (Recorde, 1542).

The latter term, meaning a ‘fourth part,’ as in the farthing to the penny, may also have referred to the rood as being a farthing-land in rental. It appears as L. furendellus, farundel, ferling.

The rood was also divided into 4 day’s-work, each of 10 square rods.

Acre.—As the rood was sometimes lineal, though usually superficial, so also the ‘acre’ was sometimes a rough lineal measure, generally an acre-breadth, or 4 rods (a cricket-pitch). But it might also be an acre-length = a rood length. The verse in 1 Samuel xiv.: ‘And that first slaughter which Jonathan and his armour bearer made was about twenty men within as it were an half-acre of land which a yoke of oxen might plow,’ is in Coverdale’s version (1535) ‘within the length of halve an aker of londe,’ that is, in a length of 20 rods. In French ‘arpent’ was likewise used for a French acre-length, reckoned, not of the official square arpent, but of the furrow-long arpent, nearly a furlong. Thus in the Chanson de Roland

Einz qu ’hum alast un sul arpent de camp

(Before one (he) went a single acre of ground)

evidently means about a furlong, just as in Iliad x., ‘when he was as far off as the length of the furrow made by mules’ has the same meaning.

Similarly the sesteirado of Provence was used as an itinerary measure, probably of 100 cano = about 220 yards, the same as the centenié.

The sesteirado, the rood of Southern France, corresponding to the boisselée, the bushel-land of Mid-France, was, like the latter, originally a seed-unit, the extent sown with a sestié of seed-corn. Its extent is 0·4 acre, = our rood. Now if this were square, each side would measure 40 yards, a length too small for itinerary measure. Neither Northern nor Southern France had any official itinerary measure under the league, so field-units were necessarily used; in the north the arpent-length, in the south the sesteirado-length; both corresponding to our rood-length, furrow-length or furlong. There seems little doubt that the centenié, the popular itinerary measure of the south, 100 cano or fathoms, was the same as the sesteirado-length. And the sesteirado being 400 square cano, it seems that its dimensions were 100 × 4 cano. It was moreover the rood, or quarter of the greater land-unit, the saumado, the ‘seam’ of land, which would thus be 100 × 16 cano just as our rood was 40 × 1 rods, and our acre 40 × 4 rods. Ten sesteirado-lengths, 10 centenié, made the milo, a mile of 1000 local fathoms, one-third of the league of Southern France.

Yardland.—L. quatrona terræ, virgata. Fr. bouvée. Bovate, Oxgang. About 30 acres more or less, including pasture and perhaps some woodland. Before the Norman conquest the gebur-geriht (boor’s right) was 6 sheep and 7 acres arable on his yard-land. This corresponds roughly to the German hufe = about 20 acres, and to the Netherlands hoeve, the unit of small holding. Almost everywhere and always, 6 or 7 acres of arable have been all that the boor’s yoke of oxen can till. There was other work for the oxen besides ploughing, and at least five ploughings were usually necessary for proper tillage; then there was cartage and feudal duties in consideration of the small rent.

In the Roll of Battel Abbey (tenth and eleventh centuries) the perch is 16 feet; the acre is 40 perches long and 4 broad and pays a penny a year; 3 shillings for the virgate or wist, the price of which was about 20 shillings. In this case 8 virgates made a hide, but this ‘eighth’ is exceptional, for the term ‘virgate’ brought a fourth sense to the virga = yard series of words, giving rise to the term yard-land as a quarter of the plough-land or hide. As the vergée in France (sometimes ambiguously called verge, as it has been seen that Recorde spoke of ‘a rodde of lande which some call a roode’) and the rood in England were a quarter-acre, and as this quarter-acre was sometimes called a ‘yard of land,’ so virga-verge-yard acquired the general sense of ‘quarter’—either of an acre or of a ploughland or carucate. Thus in ‘Quant une homme est feffe dune verge de terre et dun autre de un carue du terre’ (Statute of Wards, 1300), the term ‘verge de terre’ means not a rod, a verge, but a yardland or virgate.

‘Farthing’ or ‘ferling’ as a quarter was used in the same double sense: a quarter-acre or a quarter-hide, indeed, as will presently be seen, a quarter-virgate.

Acreme.—This old law-term for 10 acres of land points to a tradition that our original unit of land-measurement was a rood or furlong square, that is 40 × 40 rods: it was called a Ferlingata or Ferdelh.

A document temp. Edw. II describes the virgate (of which 4 made a hide; 5 hides being a knight’s fee) as of 4 (square) furlongs, each of 10 acres.

X acræ terræ faciunt unam fardellam.

Decem acræ faciunt ferlingatam; quatuor ferlingatæ faciunt virgatam, et quatuor virgatæ faciunt hidam; quinque hidæ faciunt feodum militis.

So it appears conclusive (1) that the hide was 16 square furlongs, a quarter of a square mile = the quarter section of America; (2) that the acre was originally a slice of land off the square furlong, a rood, or furlong in length, a tenth of this in breadth.

Furlong and Ferling.—The square furlong is the same as the Acreme = 10 acres. The square furlong or furrow-long tends to become confused with ferling, G. vierling, with fardel, G. viertel, with farthendale, Du. vierendeel, all meaning a fourth. This confusion arises from the square furlong, similar in sound to ferling, being approximately the fourth, or farthing, of the virgate or yardland, itself Ferlingus terræ, a fourth of the hide or ploughland. So a ferling may be a fourth of an acre, or of a virgate, or of a hide. Similarly it may be, as farthendale or farendel, a quarter-bushel.

Another cause of confusion in feudal land-measures is the money-estimation of land. Bishop Fleetwood (‘Chronicon,’ 1707) thought the acre was a marc-land of 160 pence and the rod a penny-land, denariatus terræ, so that the quarter-rod was a farthing-land. He was deceived by the coincidence of the 160 rods of the acre with the 160 pence, 13s. 4d., 8 ounces of silver, of the monetary marc, and he mistook the Farthingdale or Farendel, a quarter-acre or rood, for a quarter-rod. The acre was distinctly a penny-land, and the hide of 160 acres was a marc-land, paying 160 pence.

Hide.—Ploughland, carucate, L. carucata, Fr. caruée. Normally 16 square furlongs = 160 acres, but sometimes 120 acres or less, varying according to the arable on it; and usually divided into 4 oxgangs, bovates or yardlands. In some parts the hide seems to have comprised several ploughlands and to have coincided with the knight’s fee (see Customs of Lancaster).

Hundred.—This division of a shire is supposed to have been originally one hundred hides; more probably it was a hundred knight’s fees.

6. The Yard and the Verge

These cognate terms have many developments of meaning, running almost parallel both in English and French. ‘Yard,’ the equivalent of A.S. gyrd, geard, and perhaps gæd (gad), is cognate to ‘Rod’ and to Fr. Verge. It may mean:

1. A rod from a tree; L. virga, Fr. verge.

2. A short measure of 4 to 6 spans; Fr. verge.

3. A pole of indefinite length, in various senses, naval, &c. Fr. verge, vergue.

4. A long measure of 9 to 24 feet = rod, pole, perch. In France the perche may be from 9-1/2 feet (Burgundy) to 22 feet (French).

5. A measure of surface 9 to 24 feet square. Yard, Fr. verge.

6. A larger measure of surface 40 × 1 rod = a quarter-acre. Yard-land, rood, Fr. vergée.

7. A quarter of a still larger unit. Virgata, yard-land.

8. A holding of a rood when enclosed became a yard or garth, then a cultivated enclosure of any size: tree-yard (Du. boom-gaard), apple-garth, win-gaard (vineyard).[^[18]]

Here the Fr. verge parts company with ‘yard’; its place is taken by cour (L. curtiferum) and G. hof.

9. Any enclosed land attached to a house: Palace-yard, Fr. cour. Farm-yard, Fr. basse-cour. Court-yard, G. hof. Court = farmyard in Somerset.

Fr. verge reappears in the English form of ‘verge’ in the sense of a circle or ring, AS. gyrd, now ‘girth.’ The gyrd was a geard or yard bent into a hoop. Fr. verge = ring was a verge or rod bent into a hoop or ring. Cf. Fr. bague, ring made by bending a rod or baguette into a hoop. The English sense of ‘verge’ = circle is seen in:

O would to God that the inclusive verge

Of golden metal that must round my brow.

Rich. III, iv. 1.

To the furthest verge

That ever was survey’d by English eye.

Rich. III, i. 1.

The ‘verge’ of the King’s palace or court, sometimes stated as twelve leagues (of 1-1/2 miles), a circuit equal to about 3 miles in radius.

7. How the Rod came to be 5-1/2 Yards

The Roman pertica was 10 feet; though it seems probable that there was also a customary rod of 12 feet.

The French perche was 6 ells of 4 Roman feet, double the presumed customary perch of Rome.

The Scots rod was 6 ells of 3 Rhineland feet.

The German and Norse ruthen are nearly always either of 12 or of 16 feet.

How came it that the English rod was fixed, about the time of Edward I, at 5-1/2 yards = 16-1/2 feet?

There is reason to believe that it was originally 5 yards, at first in Roman feet, then in Rhineland feet.

A length of 5 yards and 1 or 2 inches (= 1/(8 × 40) of the Roman mile) survives in the Dorsetshire ‘goad’ or ‘lug.’[^[19]]

The Cornish rod or yard is 2 staves of 3 yards = 6 yards. There was, as late as 1540, a rod of 6 yards, ‘every pole containing eighten footes of the kinges standard.’

The rod of Guernsey, of Lancashire and of Ireland is 7 yards; it is the French perche of 20 pieds = 21·36 feet taken roughly at 21 English feet; this, and the Cheshire rod of 8 yards = 4 fathoms, are probably of Norman origin.

The English rod of pre-Norman and early Norman times was probably the Teutonic rod of 16 feet, as seen in the Roll of Battel Abbey. How did it become 16-1/2 feet?

I cannot absolutely solve the question; I can only offer the possible hypotheses:

1. That 5-1/2 yards was a compromise between a Southern rod of 5 yards and a Northern of 6 yards. But the former length only survived in the Dorsetshire lug, probably from Roman times, and 16 feet is the probable length of the Southern rod. And such a compromise is most improbable. I know of no measure established as a mean of two different measures.

2. That the length of the 5-1/2-yard rod was taken from that of the medieval lance. Certainly in France there is some evidence of the spear-length being used as a rough land-measure, ‘un hanst’ or ‘une hanstée’ de terre. ‘Hanste,’ in modern French hampe, a shaft, is from L. hasta. Doubtless very long lances have been used by infantry. The Macedonian phalanx had lances of 8 yards, so that five rows of spear points projected from its front. The Scots lance was 6 ells, the Scots rod, ‘That in all, Spears be six Elns in length, under the pain of etc.’ (James III); but this length, = 18-1/2 feet, was ordered two centuries later than Edward I, at a time when infantry were brought to resist the onslaught of cavalry. Two centuries later still, it was ordered by 13 Chas. II that a pikeman was to be armed with a pike not under 16 feet in length. It is improbable that in Edward I’s time foot soldiers were armed with pikes anything like that length, while the knights’ spears could not have been longer than 10 feet. Those shown in the Bayeux embroidery are about 7 feet.

It is possible that the length of the ox-goad may have been used as a rough land-measure, but English ox-goads appear to have usually been only about the length of the Cornish goad, not more than 3 yards long.

Inclined myself to this second hypothesis—for was not Hector’s spear of 11 cubits = 22 spans, and are not 22 spans = 16-1/2 feet?—I yet acknowledge that it is scarcely tenable.

3. The most probable hypothesis is that the Rod was originally a North German Ruthe of 16 Norse or Rhineland feet brought over by Saxons or Danes, and that, established as is seen by the Roll of Battel Abbey ‘pertica vero xvi pedes,’ it was afterwards adjusted to the standard of the King’s foot. Thus 16 Rhineland feet = 16 feet 5·7 inches; which would make the statute rod practically 16 feet 6 inches. In North Germany the Ruthe is usually of 16 local feet, originally, it may be presumed, Rhineland feet, displaced by the local foot = 11·23 to 11·5 inches. Sometimes this fall in the length of the foot is compensated by an increase in the number of ruthen to the ‘morgen’ or acre, sometimes, as in Holland, by making the roede 13 Amsterdam short feet (of 11 inches) instead of 12 Rhineland feet.

It seems likely that the North German acker of 160 square ruthen came to Northern France with the Franks and the Normans, that it became the Acre de Normandie of 160 square rods, the length of the rod becoming changed by the influence of the French standard of 6 aunes = 24 Roman feet. This length of 24 feet passed, under Norman influence, to Cheshire, becoming the local rod of 8 yards or 24 English feet.

The rod of 6 aunes, French ells, passed to Scotland as 6 ells, but 6 Scots ells = 18 Rhineland feet.

8. How the Acre came to be 160 Rods

The North German acker or morgen is 160 ruthen. Why? It may be presumed that, on the sexdecimal system dear to the bucolic mind throughout the world, it was 16 times an original unit of 10 square ruthen, of 16 feet square, analogous to the Greek plethron of 10 square kalamoi and to the Provençal cosso of 10 square fathom-rods. There is still extant, in North Holland, the snees, snick, or score, of land, = 20 square roede.

The Austrian joch is 1600 square ‘klafter’ of 6 feet = 1·42 acre.

There are 1600 square rods in our square furlong, the original square unit of which the acre is a one-tenth slice.

In Provence, the people, long under Roman influence, are yet much more Greek than Roman, and there is not a trace of any Roman standard among their weights and measures. There the greater land-unit is the saumado of 1600 square cano of 6 feet. It is divided in two ways: (1) on the sexdecimal system,[^[20]] (2) into 160 cosso, each of 10 square cano.

It seems as if the 1600 small units in our square furlong, in the Austrian joch, in the Provençal saumado, come from an extension of the sexdecimal multiple 16 to 160 and 1600.

9. Customs of Lancaster

‘Customs of places doe differ; for in the Dutchy of Lancaster a knightes fee containeth foure hides of land, every hide foure ploughlands called in latine carucata terræ, and that is quantum aratrum arare potest in æstivo tempore, and that is (as I take it) which is in the North parts called an Oxegange. And every ploughland or carue is foure yard land which in latine is called quatrona terræ; every yardland thirty acres, halfe a yard land in some places in the West is called a Cosset, half a Cosset is a Mese which containeth about 7-1/2 acres. But commonly a carue or plow-land containeth a hundreth and twenty acres; a hide of land 480 acres and every knightes fee 1920 acres. But after some computations, a knights fee containeth five hydes of land, every hyde foure yard land, and every yard land twenty foure acres.’ (‘The Surveior’s Dialogue,’ by J. Norden, ‘at my poore house at Hendon, 27 Martis 1610.’)

So in Domesday Book it will be found that ‘inter Ripe et Mersham,’ between the Ribble and the Mersey, the hide was not synonymous with the carucate. The series of feudal measures appears to have been there:

Acre, of Lancashire standard = 1·62 statute acres.

Bovate or Virgate of about 15 acres, paying about 4 pence ‘relief’ to the king.

Carucate or Ploughland, of 8 bovates, paying about 32 pence.

Hide of 6 carucates, paying about one pound.

These feudal measures were evidently vague and variable. The King’s assessment was very much the same as it was in Upper Burma fifty years ago. There no survey was required; the land-tax (very light, as the king’s revenue was derived, as in medieval England, from forest and other monopolies and from fines) was one rupee a plough, that is for a plough and a yoke of cattle. The Norman kings’ assessment was for the common plough of the whole carucate, 4 oxgangs.

10. Seed-measures of Land

When men, emerging from the pastoral stage, took to agriculture, land was plentiful and would roughly but conveniently be estimated by the quantity of seed-corn required for it. Thus seed-units of land were the earliest, and many survive to this day.

It was ordered in Israel (Lev. xxvij.) that land should be ‘estimated according to the seed thereof, an homer of barley-seed shall be valued at fifty shekels of silver.’ Taking the homer at 8 bushels, a homer of land = 3 or 4 acres, was worth 50 shekels, or half-crowns, of silver.

The Romans had the modius of land, sown with a modius, about 1/4 bushel, of corn.

In Northern France there is still the bonnier of land, about 4 acres, sown with a boune or bounie of seed, about 8 bushels.

Throughout the greater part of France the land is reckoned in seterées or sesteirado, units now fixed but originally named after the variable setier of seed-corn.

Smaller units are the mine or eiminado, and boisselée, all seed-units.

In North Germany the Scheffel, or Schepel (Du.), corn-measure is also a land-measure of about half an acre. The Schepel passed from Holland to New England as the Skipple, a bushel-skip. In North Germany and Norway there is the Tunn or Tonde, a barrel of about 4 bushels, corresponding to the Tondeland of about 1-1/3 acre (roughly equal to the French estrée).

To the Salma of Italy, to the Saumado (she-ass load) of Provence, corresponds the old English Seam, the Quarter of corn. The word seam hence got the general meaning of a quarter. So although the Seam of Corn would sow 4 acres, a seam of an acre meant a quarter-acre.

‘A Sester or Sextarius was what we call a Quarter or a seam containing 8 bushels (Sauma, quod unius equi fit sauma, i.e. sarcina)’ (Bishop Fleetwood, 1707).

There are still traces of seed-measures to be found in some parts of England. But in ‘A pek of londe’—‘Half a pek and a nayle of londe’ (Rolls of Parliament, 1442),[^[21]] it is doubtful whether the peck of land was really a seed-measure or a quarter-acre, as the peck is a quarter-bushel. A nail of land would be 1/16 acre.

There were seed-measures of land in Scotland. Thus: ‘15th Cy. Chart Aberd. Als mekill land as a celdr of aits will schawe,’ i.e. a Chalder of land, as much as a chalder = 64 firlots = 55 bushels, will sow, about 25 acres. There was also the Lippy of land, that which took a lippy, 1/16 firlot of seed. It was usually about 100 square yards.

In many parts of Southern Europe there are no other kinds of land-measure than those derived from the corn-measures of seed required.

Thus in Provence, the earliest civilised country in medieval times, the whole series of corn-measures and land-measures have names in common.

These land-measures would correspond to Coomb-land, Bushel-land, Peck-land, &c. The Cosso of land is 1/160 of the Saumado, as our square rod is 1/160 acre.

In Italy and Spain there are similar series of land-measures named after corn-measures.

[15]. For evidence on the form of agrarian units see Notes in section 5 of this chapter.

[16]. It is worth remark that the 160 square rods of the Irish, Lancashire or Guernsey acre being equal to 1·62 statute acres, 100 of these square rods would make almost exactly a statute acre. A rod of 6·957 yards would give a decimal square rod of 48·4 square yards equal 1-10th square chain, or 1-100th acre, or 1-1000th square furlong. A square-shape acre is 69·57 yards square.

[17]. I insert this note (sent to the Academy in August 1896 by the late Mr. F. J. Furnivall, who found it in a Bodleian MS.) because it happened to direct my attention to our measures, and was thus the seed whence this book has sprung. The yardland and hide are here of less than half the usual extent.

[18]. Orthodoxly A.S. gaard is considered to be unconnected with geard, a yard or rod.

[19]. Whence the term ‘lug’ = rod? I venture a derivation:

1. Lug, the ear.

2. Luggie (Sc.), a milking vessel with handles or lugs.

3. Lug, lugge, of land, that can be metely sown with a luggie of seed-corn.

4. Lug, the rod-length of the lug of land.

5. Lug, a rod, as for ‘waling’ fruit trees.

[20]. Concordantly with the sexdecimal system of corn-measures into 4 sesteirado, or 8 eiminado. See Seed-measures in Section 10.

[21]. Quoted in the New English Dictionary, a treasury of quotations, which has often put me on the track of valuable information.

CHAPTER VII
ENGLISH COMMERCIAL WEIGHTS

I. The Story of Averdepois

The story of our Imperial system has hitherto been utterly obscure. The origin of our foot, our gallon, our pound, indeed of all our measures, was quite unknown. That of the pound, which gives the key to the whole system, had been obscured by statutes which ignored any but the royal pound used at the mints. Yet these statutes, often purposely obscure, can be made to show the hidden sources of our system.

Our pound, settled at its present Imperial standard in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was then found to have risen slightly since the time of Edward III. It was found to have increased by about 8 grains. The ounce, now = 437-1/2 grains, had been 437 grains, the same weight as the ounce of Egypto-Roman pound, the Roman libra.[^[22]] There is every reason to believe that this Roman standard passed to Britain, and that the libra, raised to 16 ounces, became the commercial pound, afterwards known as Averdepois, and now the Imperial pound.

When the Romans took the Alexandrian talent as the standard of their new libra-system, they divided it into 125 libræ, which were 1500 ounces or double-shekels, each ounce = 437 grains.

When the Arab Caliphs conquered the southern and eastern Mediterranean countries, they found in Egypt the Egypto-Roman pound, 1/125 of the Alexandrian talent; they adopted it, and divided it for coin-weight purposes into 72 mithkals, just as the Roman Emperors had divided the old As pound into 72 aurei; so 6 mithkals = the libra-ounce of 437 grains, just as 6 aurei = the As-ounce of 420-2/3 grains. It is not improbable that the survival of the Roman commercial pound in Saxon England was strengthened by commercial and scientific relations with the Moors of Spain. King Offa of Mercia struck a gold coin with an Arabic inscription, dated 157 of the Hejira = A.D. 774.

However this may have been, there seems no doubt that the Roman pound, raised to 16 ounces, was the standard of England before as after the Norman conquest, and there is no evidence of it having ever been in abeyance. In early Plantagenet times there was a sexdecimal series of weights:

The Stone of 16 lb.

The Wey of 16 stone = 256 lb.

There was also the Hundredweight, of which 20 made a ton of 2000 lb.; and 20 weys made a Last of approximately 5120 lb. or 2-1/2 tons.

The pound was divided into 16 ounces, each = 437 grains, and the ounce into 16 drams or drops = 27·3 grains.

Both before and after the Conquest there was another pound used in the mints, like the As in Rome. It was of Tower, or Cologne-marc, standard. There were doubtless many local variations of commercial standard, especially in measures of capacity, and it was the necessity of checking these which made King John and his successors declare that ‘there should be one standard throughout our kingdom, whether in weights or in measures.’

But the king had a mint-pound of his own, and he had to reconcile the existence of the coinage-pound and of the commercial pound with the customary declaration of unity of weight made in each reign. The king’s councillors evaded the difficulty by pretending that the measures of capacity were based on the mint-pound and, in statutes where a commercial pound had to be mentioned, by pretending that this was equal to 25 shillings weight or 15 ounces of the mint-pound. This deception led to others, so that, to make out the meaning of a statute of weights and measures, one must be able to read between the lines, and to be prepared for misleading and contradictory statements. I will take as an instance, Act 51 Henry III (1267):

An English peny called a Sterling, round and without clipping, shall weigh 32 wheat corns in the midst of the ear; and 20 d. do make an Ounce, and 12 Ounces one Pound, and 8 Pounds do make a gallon of wine and 8 gallons of wine do make a London Bushel which is the eighth part of a Quarter.

This declaration may be thus interpreted:

In the Tower there is a standard pound. An English silver penny should weigh 1/240 of this pound and 1/20 of its ounce, and the penny-weight may be divided into 32 aces or little grains. But there is another old-established pound used for all goods but gold and silver, bread and drugs. Our regard for the unity of weight forbids us to describe this pound otherwise than by mentioning that a wine-gallon contains 8 of these pounds weight of wine or of water, that 8 larger gallons each containing 8 pounds, not of wine, but of wheat, make a Bushel; and that 8 of these bushels make a quarter of a Chaldron containing a ton or 2000 lb. of wheat.

That this is correct is easily proved.

The Bushel is 1/8 of the Quarter, which was the quarter of a chaldron, the measure of a ton of 20 true hundredweight. The quarter was 500 lb. of average wheat, and the bushel weighed 500/8 = 62-1/2 averdepois lb. of wheat or, in wheat-water ratio, 78 lb. of wine or of water, the specific gravity of which differs but little. But 8 × 8 Tower lb. of wine = (5400 grs. × 8 × 8)/7000 = 49·4 averdepois lb. or, to be quite accurate, 49·5 lb. of early Plantagenet averdepois weight, when the ounce was of Roman standard, 437 grains; how then could the bushel = 78 lb. of wine, be the measure of 49·5 lb. of wine?

That there were two different gallons, the one for wine, the other for corn, is shown in the Ordinance 31 Edw. III, where it is ordered that ‘8 lb. of wheat shall make a gallon.’ It is true that this is continued by ‘the lb. shall contain 20 s.’; but very soon after the ordinance states that, for everything except groceries, each lb. shall be of 25 s., and we know that the 25 s. was merely a subterfuge to show the averdepois pound as 15 ounces Tower, afterwards 15 ounces Troy, neither of which it ever was: we may therefore dismiss this statement, and recognise that the wine-gallon held approximately 8 averdepois lb. of wine, and that the corn gallon, about one-fourth larger, held 8 averdepois lb. of wheat.

Further evidence is to be found in 12 Henry VII (1496).

This statute, after the usual preamble about ‘one weight and one measure,’ orders:

That the measure of a Bushel contain 8 gallons of wheat, and that every Gallon contain 8 lb. of wheat of Troy weight, and every Pound contain 12 ounces of Troy weight, and every Ounce contain 20 sterlings and every Sterling be of the weight of 32 Corns of wheat that grew in the midst of the ear of wheat according to the old law of the land.

While the bushel is now described as containing 8 gallons of wheat and each gallon 8 pounds of wheat, the old fiction is kept up that these are royal pounds. Only these pounds are now Troy, of 5760 grains, instead of Tower, of 5400 grains; 64 Troy pounds were equal to 52-2/3 lb. averdepois, a weight still far from the 62-1/2 lb. averdepois of wheat contained in the extant bushel-measure of Henry VII. And though the mints were coining 420, instead of 240, pennies from the 5760 grain-pound of silver, so that these were little more than half the weight of Henry III’s pennies, yet they were still of the weight of 32 wheat-corns.

The substance of this statute was embodied in a State-document adorned with a picture of the King’s Steward presiding over the gauging of bushels and weighing of wheat-corns, surmounted by a picture of two entwined wheat-ears with the inscription:

The Conage of the Mynte.

The whete eare. Two graynes maketh the xvi p^te. of a penny, ffower graynes maketh the viij p^te. of a penny.

After this impudent assertion one is not surprised to read that it was ‘the same tyme ordeired that xvi uncs of Troie maketh the Haberty poie a pounde for to buy spice[^[23]] by,’ nor by the statement that ‘the C is true at this daye, ffyve score for the hundred as appeareth in Magna Carta.’

Comment on these ingenious statements seems hardly necessary.

The only changes in English weights since the time of Henry III, or indeed much earlier times, have been:

1. The raising of the hundredweight to 112 lb.

2. The lowering of the stone from 16 lb. to 14 lb. to make it one-eighth of the new hundredweight.

3. The rise of the averdepois pound from 16 Roman ounces of 437 grains to 16 ounces of 437-1/2 grains; a difference of 8 grains, so as to make it 7000 grains of the Tudor Troy pound.

4. The re-legalising of the 100 lb. or cental weight in 1879.

I may observe that the octonary series of measures of capacity, also of the 14 lb. stone and new Cwt., is quite in harmony with the sexdecimal system, however objectionable be those units.

The Recognition of Averdepois Weight

It is not until 1485 (Ripon Ch. Acts, quoted in the ‘New English Dictionary’) that we find mention of averdepois, though there had been standard weights of it from temp. Edw. III, ‘per balance cum ponderibus de haberdepase,’ and those standards were extant in the time of Elizabeth.

The document embodying 12 Henry VII (1496) mentions, as has been seen, the Habertypoie pound, with the assertion that it was 16 Troy ounces, an assertion causing confusion for centuries afterwards.

In Arnold’s ‘Customs of London,’ c. 1500, there is mentioned ‘the Lyggynge Weyght, by which is boughte and solde all maner of marchaundise as tynne, ledde ... and al maner of specery ... and such other as is used to be solde by weyght; and of this weyght xvj uncis make a pound, and C and xij li. is an C, and x C make a M of all suche marchaundises ... except wulle.’

This ‘lying weight’ was by the balance, the weight lying in one scale, and not hanging or sliding on the beam of a stilyard as in Auncell weight. The stilyard, very portable, as not requiring heavy weights, yet admitted of fraud. Arnold says ‘this weight is forboden in England by statute of parlement, and also holy church hath cursed in England all that beyen or sellen by that auncel weyght.’

In 1532 it was ordered by 24 Henry VIII that meat ‘shall be sold by weight called Haver-du-pois,’ and in 1543 Recorde (‘Ground of Artes’) says, ‘But commenly there is used an other weyght called haberdyepoyse in which 16 onces make a pounde.’

In 1545 the Custom-House notified that ‘thys lyinge and Habardy peyse is all one.’

Having cleared away, as I hope, the obscurity which so long hung over the commercial weight ignored by the statutes, it may be well to mention that ‘Averdepois’ is the best spelling of this word, and is so accepted by the ‘New English Dictionary.’ ‘Aver’ is an old-established English word for ‘goods,’ and the earlier form ‘Haberdepase’ shows the original pronunciation. The spelling of the last syllable in ‘Averdepois’ is a sufficient concession to an incorrect modern custom.

The term originally applied to heavy goods, such as came from beyond sea; if the word was sometimes spelt, as in 25 Edw. III, ‘bledz, avoirdepois, chars, pessons’ (corn, heavy goods, meat, fish), it does not follow that the oi diphthong was pronounced as in ‘boy.’ The word pessons, now written poissons, shows the sound-value of the diphthong. The sound now given to it in modern French is a corruption. Up till 1700, even in Paris, oi was pronounced é or wé. ‘Averdepez’ is the true pronunciation. However, the influence of ‘poise’ prevents any improvement on the word being written and pronounced as ‘Averdepois.’

Though measures of capacity had always been on an averdepois basis, the admission of averdepois weight to statute recognition only dates from the time of Elizabeth. In her reign light begins to appear in our system of weights and measures. In 1574 she ordered a jury to examine the standard weights (many of Edward III and succeeding kings), to report on them, and to construct standards ‘as well of troy weight as of the avoirdupois.’

The standards made by this jury were as unsatisfactory as their report. Little could be expected from persons who could, with Edward III’s standard weights before them, report that ‘the lb. weight of avoirdepoiz weight dothe consiste of fiftene ounc troie.’ This was in accordance with the old fiction that the averdepois pound must be a commercial offshoot of the royal pound, that it was 15 ounces Tower = 6750 grains, and afterwards in Tudor times 15 ounces Troy = 7200 grains, or even 16 ounces Troy = 7680 grains.

Elizabeth and her advisers were not deceived by this obsequious report, so, the standards made being found very erroneous, in 1582 a second and more intelligent jury of goldsmiths and merchants was appointed, and the result of their work was the production of 57 sets of standard Troy and averdepois weights, which were distributed to the Exchequer, to cities and towns. Some of these averdepois weights are still extant and do not now differ by more than one grain in each pound from Imperial standard.

The Proclamation for Weights of December 16, 1587, established averdepois weight, and ordered that ‘no person shall use any Troy weight but only for weighing of bread, gold, silver and electuaries and for no other thing.’

It seems probable that, in the two centuries before Elizabeth, the standard of the commercial pound had risen by about 8 grains. This may have occurred when the Troy pound superseded the Tower pound. In the adjustment, which I assume as probable, of the Troy and Averdepois pounds so as to obtain a ratio of 5760 to 7000, the latter standard, raising the ounce from 437 to 437-1/2 grains, and the pound by 8 grains, may have been adopted so as to avoid or diminish the cutting down of the new Troy pound.

Thus was established by Elizabeth the English standard of weight. Excellent standards of capacity and of length were also made; and she established our silver coinage on its present basis.

And yet, well into the nineteenth century, even into the twentieth, went on the puzzledom of our weights and measures, left to arithmetic book and almanack makers blinded by the glamour of the royal pound.

No official utterance came to clear the darkness, for it was not till 1855 that the pound, then established as an Imperial standard, was really defined.

2. The Imperial Pound

It is the weight in vacuo of a certain piece of platinum kept in London. It is divided into 16 ounces, approximately Roman ounces. The ounce may be divided into 16 drams.

The pound is also divided into 7000 grains, the ounce being 437-1/2 grains.

It may be well to anticipate or remove any uncertainty about the grain. The averdepois pound was only divided into ounces and drams (just as the yard is only divided, as a yard, into quarters and nails), but on its adjustment with the troy pound as = 7000 grains of which the latter = 5760, it became divisible into grains. These were long called Troy grains, in consequence of the superstition about the noble Troy weight. This word seems to have paralysed the intelligence of many persons doubtless sensible enough in other matters; thus Rees’ ‘Cyclopædia’ (1819) informed its readers that ‘the pound or 7680 grains avoirdupois equals 7000 grains troy, and hence 1 grain troy equals 1·097 avoirdupois.’

The weight of the standard pound in a vacuum (that is, its weight not diminished by the buoyancy of the air) being 7000 grains, a commercial brass pound exactly equal to the platinum standard when weighed against it in air at 62°, would weigh 7000·6 grains in a vacuum.

The Dram

This, 1/16 of an ounce = 27-1/3 grains, is principally used as a unit for powder in the cartridges of sporting guns. In Scotland it was called a ‘drop.’

1673. A quech weighing 18 unce and 10 drop.

1805. An arrow of from 20 to 24 drop weight (‘N.E.D.’).

The dram was possibly so called from its corresponding to the quentchen, 1/8 of the German Loth or half-ounce (1/16 of a marc) as the drachm was 1/8 of a medicinal ounce.[^[24]] Or it may merely have been called a dram as being the part of the ounce, in the same way that the drachm was the next lower part of the apothecaries’ ounce.

3. Scientific and Medicinal Divisions of the Pound

For scientific purposes the pound is considered as of 7000 grains. It may be divided into tenths, hundredths, thousandths; this last division being called a Septem, as = 7 grains. The tenth of this might be called a Septula = 0·7 grain, and the hundredth a Septicent = 0·07 grain. This small weight would be one 100,000th of the gallon, the same proportion as the centigramme to the litre. In analyses of water the solid constituents are usually stated in centigrammes to the litre, or parts in 100,000; and as grains to the gallon or parts in 70,000 they have to be divided by 0·7 to get that ratio. Septicents to the gallon would be the English equivalent of centigrammes to the litre.

An Apothecaries’ Troy ounce lingers in the Board of Trade list of standards, for a permissive use utterly unrequired by medical prescribers or by druggists; the British Pharmacopœia only recognising Imperial weight, the ounce and the grain. For convenience, a weight of 60 grains is called a Drachm, and one of 20 grains is called a Scruple. It is most rare for prescriptions to contain an ounce of any solid medicine; and when an ounce of such a medicine is most exceptionally prescribed, it might be an Imperial ounce, just as ounces of fluid medicines prescribed are Imperial ounces.

4. The Long Hundredweight

The multiples of the pound were originally, like its divisions, in a sexdecimal series, with an alternative series to bring in the hundredweight, i.e. the true Cwt.

The approximative relation of the quarter, strictly speaking of 512 lb., mattered but little, as it applied to corn-measure, in which the measured quarter, 8 bushels, varied from 500 lb. for wheat of 62-1/2 lb. to the bushel, to 512 lb. for heavy wheat of 64 lb. to the bushel. The arrangement was convenient for the corn-trade and could not give rise to fraud; and the main object of all laws on weights and measures should be to prevent fraud, especially in retail trade.

This convenient arrangement was altered in the times of Edward I and Edward III. The former King found the Cwt. of 100 lb. with a quarter of 25 lb. and a sixteenth = 6-1/4 lb. as its nail or clove. In his Acts there is mention of the 100 weight, the 1000 weight, the 2000 weight. But by the Ordinance of Measures 31 Edw. I, 1302, a distractingly obscure statute, no less than three different weights are ordered for the stone:

A stone for lead of 12 lb.

A London stone of 12-1/2 lb., one-eighth of the true Cwt.

A stone for groceries of 8 lb.; and 13-1/2 stone to make a Cwt. of 108 lb.

And the ‘fotmal’ of lead is to be 6 stones of 12 lb. but less 2 lb., ‘which are 70 lb. making 5 stones.’

Here then we see, besides a 12 lb. stone for lead,

(a) The true Cwt. of 100 lb. divided into quarters and nails.

(b) A transitional Cwt. of 108 lb. in 13-1/2 old half-stones of 8 lb.

(c) A new Cwt. of 112 lb. in 8 stones of 14 lb.

The Cwt. (centena) of 108 lb. seems to have been preparatory to the Cwt. of 112 lb. mentioned in this Ordinance (if it be not a later interpolation) and established later by Edward III. It preserved, for a time, the ancient half-stone of 8 lb., but by the inconvenient process of making 13-1/2 of these as the Cwt.; probably to prepare the merchant for a new Cwt. of 112 lb. first in 14 stones of 8 lb. and then in 8 stones of 14 lb.

This is the Cwt. which has come down from Edward III to the present day, against which trade has had to struggle more or less successfully ever since, and which torments the schoolboy with sums in tons, cwts., qrs. and lb.

To this day the old Stone of 16 lb. or its half, the Clove of 8 lb., still continues in use. The butcher’s and fishmonger’s stone is 8 lb., and cheese is sold, in most parts of England, by the 16 lb. stone, as it was five or six centuries ago. In 1434, by 9 Henry VI, it was ordered that the Wey of cheese should contain 32 cloves, yet we learn from Arnold (1500) that the weight of Suffolk Cheese is xij score and xvj lb., the same weight as the wey (16 × 16 = 256 lb.), and Recorde (1543) says that for butter and cheese ‘a clove containeth 8 lb. and a wey 32 cloves which is 256 lb.’ By 10 Anne (1712) a barrel of soap is to contain 256 lb., i.e. a Wey.

The Plantagenet 14 lb. stone is used for flour and potatoes, &c., but the load, the modern form of the wey, is 18 stone of 14 lb. = 252 lb., evidently an approximately near substitute for the 16 × 16 lb. = 256 lb. of the Wey, there being until quite recently no lawful weights allowed above 7 lb. but in multiples of that weight. The load, like the wey, has the advantage of being equal to 4 bushels of heavy corn at 63 lb., so that it is half of the Quarter and an eighth of the wheat-chaldron or ton-measure.

What was the reason for the Plantagenet Cwt.? for the inconvenient unit, rightly rejected by our brethren in North America, and in several colonies?

Edward I’s intermediate Cwt. of 108 lb. seems to show that it was intended to bring our Cwt. up to that of foreign countries using Troy pounds, 108 lb. being very close to the French and Flemish quintal (Arabic cantar) of 100 Troy lb. The wool-trade with Flanders, the dominion of the Plantagenets in France, may have been the motives for this increase.

The hypothesis that the Cwt. was made 112 lb. so as to be equal to 100 long Troy lb. of 16 Troy ounces, is excluded by the ratio of averdepois to long troy being 100 to 109·7 and also by the new Cwt. dating at least from the time of Edward III, when the royal lb. was still Tower, not Troy, with a ratio to averdepois of 100 to 128; and it was certainly not of 16 ounces.

The only lawful multiples of the Imperial pound were, until quite recently, those of the stone series:

And the only lawful weights were those of 56, 28, 14, 7, 4, 2, and 1 lb.

I have had some personal experience of the inconvenience of these weights. For years I had to weigh recruits and other soldiers, recording their weights in pounds with this inconvenient set of weights. To get the weight of a man of 152 lb. I had to reckon 2 × 56 lb. + 28 + 7 + 4 + 1 lb. Errors were necessarily frequent when many weighings had to be rapidly done, so I had a set of decimal weights made—20, 10, 5 lb.—and all trouble ceased. But these weights were not lawful, at least for trade purposes.

There was, however, another lawful unit, the Cental, that is, the original English Cwt., brought back to England from North America by the corn-trade. Commerce demanded the recognition of the Cental and got it in 1879.

In 1902, the tobacco-trade in Liverpool, annoyed at the inconvenience of the lawful units of weight, as inconvenient for the wholesale tobacco-warehouse as for my military purposes, moved the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to get the Board of Trade to allow them to use a half-cental weight; a whole cental, the only lawful unit of the kind, being too heavy for handling. In reply to this request, it was suggested that a nest of weights, 28 + 14 + 7 + 1 lb. = 50 lb. might be used. To this the tobacco-trade objected, and after correspondence, the use of a 50 lb. weight was granted. Then they requested permission to use smaller fractions of the cental, in fact a decimal series of 20, 10, 5 lb. And they obtained it. So, thanks to the perseverance of the Liverpool tobacco-merchants and Chamber of Commerce, the decimal fractions of the Cental are now lawful weights, and no one need use the inconvenient 14 lb. stone series.

5. Wool and Lead Weight

Wool Weight

The revenue of the Plantagenet kings being largely derived from duties on the export of wool, the weight of the sack was fixed by statute. By 31 Edw. I ‘the sack of wool ought to weigh 28 stone of 12-1/2 lb.’ = 350 lb. By 14 Edw. III ‘the sack shall contain 26 stone and each stone 14 lb.’ = 364 lb., i.e. 2 weys of 13 stone. This regulation was supported by other statutes, in 1389 and 1496, and appears to have had due effect, for it is the standard at the present time: 26 stone or 13 ‘tods.’

Why was this particular weight ordered?

Possibly because the sack thus corresponded nearly to the skippund (ship-pound) of the Baltic trade and of Scotland, a weight of 20 lispund each of 16 Norse Troy pounds or of 20 pounds of light standard = 352 to 375 lb. The Baltic skippund at the present day is about 350 lb.

In Scotland the sack of wool was ordered to be 24 stone, which was equivalent to 26 English stone, in proportion to the heavier weight of the Scots pound.

The Plantagenet domination in France caused the stone to pass there, though not always at English weight; and there being no regular weight in France between the pound and the quintal, local stones came into use. ‘Les laines vend on par sacs et par pois, par pierres, par claus et par livres,’ the French terms for the sack, the wey, the stone, the clove and the pound.[^[25]] Sometimes the stone was called ‘gal’ (stone, galet, shingle) and the clove ‘demi-gal’ (Livre blanc de l’hotel de ville d’Abbeville). The French stone was of variable weight. One record gives the sack of wool (= 4 Montpellier light quintals) as of 25 pierres, which would make them 9 lb. each. Another record gives it as 36 stone of 9 standard pounds (= 10 English pounds).

The stone appears to be extinct now in France; I find that as late as 1579 wool was sold in Burgundy by the wool-stone (la pierre de laine) = 12 French or about 13 English pounds.

While the old English wey or load was 16 × 16 = 256 lb., the wey ordered for wool was half a sack = 182 lb. It would seem that, once the King’s dues paid, the shipper was free to make up his sacks or sarplers of wool as most convenient to him. The customary wey or weigh (Sc. waugh or wall) seems to have been 32 cloves or nails of 7 lb. = 2 cwt. A ‘poke’ of wool ‘weand 4 C. 15 nallis,’ i.e. 4 cwt. and 105 lb. A sack might be ‘6 wall and 25 naill,’ i.e. 12 cwt. and 175 lb.

The wey or weigh became, in statute French, poids, pois; but the scribes took the wrong pois and thinking it meant ‘pease’ made it pisa in their Latin, just as they took the wrong ‘nail’ and made it L. clavus, and in French clau, through L. clavis, meaning a ‘key.’

Lead Weight

While the fother is 17-2/3 cwt. for coal, it is 19-1/2 cwt. = 2184 lb. for lead. This peculiar unit, also called the char or load, is the consequence of a statute 31 Edw. I, perhaps the most confused and bewildering of the many confused medieval statutes on weights and measures, and one in which subsequent interpolations may be suspected. It ordered two stones, one of 12 lb. and another of 12-1/2 lb., and to keep up the pretence of there being no weight other than of Tower standard, it declared that a pound shall contain 25 shillings. This shilling standard may be put aside.

The 12 lb. stone is ordered apparently either as a double of a customary ‘lead-pound’ of 6 lb. or to make the customary fotmal or ‘pig’ of lead, 70 lb. weight, ‘contain 6 stones (of 12 lb.) less 2 lb.’ It also says that the deduction of 2 lb. leaves ‘70 lb. making 5 stones.’ This passage appears to be a subsequent interpolation after the institution of Edward III’s 14 lb. stone.

The fother of lead, of 30 fotmals, would thus be = 2100 lb. But the stone of 12-1/2 lb., evidently intended to be 1/8 of the true hundredweight, and to pave the way for the coming 14 lb. stone, is also applied to lead. How it is not said; but the present fother, = 2184 lb., is almost exactly equal to 30 fotmal, each of 73 lb. = 2190 lb.; and 73 lb. is just 6 stone of 12-1/2 lb. less 2 lb.

The 70 lb. fotmal seems to have disappeared by the seventeenth century, but in the meantime the uncertainty of the fother led to the use of Boole-weight, meaning the weight used at the lead-boles or natural bowls in which lead ore was smelted. The fother, boole-weight, was 30 fotmals of 6 stone of 14 lb. Sometimes it was of 24 fotmals = 2016 lb., that is 18 cwt.

The meaning of Fother is given in [Chapter XX].

6. Trade-units of Weight

It is unnecessary to describe or even name the various weights peculiar to trade or local custom. Everyone in the trade knows them; out of it no one need know them. If a person not in the trade buys a cask of wine, a barrel of beer, a sack of flour or a load of potatoes, commonsense prompts him to ask how many gallons or pounds are contained in these units. It is the same in France and other countries of the metric system, where the cask, the sack, the churnful, &c., are trade-units with their peculiar equivalents of litres or kilogrammes. It is indeed by the use of trade-units that manufacturers evade the rigour of the metric system.

[22]. The modern libbra is 12 ounces = 436·27 grains in Rome, 436·66 in Florence.

[23]. Probably in the meaning of the Dutch spijs, food.

[24]. The dram of spirits is a measure probably so called from its being 1/8 of a pint, i.e. half a quartern.

[25]. See section on the Nail and the Clove, [Chap. XX].

CHAPTER VIII
ENGLISH MEASURES OF CAPACITY

I. The Old Wine Measures

It has been seen that a cubic foot of water is very approximately = 1000 Roman ounces = 62-1/2 lb. of water at the early averdepois standard. There is reason to believe that this cubic foot was our original wine-unit, the wine-bushel, 1/8 of it = 216 cubic inches, being the wine-gallon; and that the cubic foot, increased in water-wheat ratio 1728 × 1·25 = 2160 c.i., was the corn-bushel. The corn-gallon, 2160/8 = 270 c.i., remained at this standard for centuries, 268·8 c.i. being the London measure, and 272-1/4 c.i. the Winchester measure, the slight differences being due to difficulties in casting and gauging shallow metal pans.

That the wine-gallon was originally 1/8 cubic foot is rendered very probable by the existence in Ireland of a gallon of almost exactly that capacity. This gallon was legalised for ale, beer and spirits by George II (1735) at a capacity of 217·6 c.i.

The rise of the wine-gallon in England to 219 c.i., to 224 c.i., and finally to 231 c.i. under Henry VIII, seems due to two influences:

1. The desire to make it hold 8 lb. of wine = about 222 c.i., that weight being mentioned in statute.

2. The influence of wine-measures used at the ports whence wine came.

The principal unit of wine-measure at Bordeaux, and some other continental ports, was the Velte, the equivalent of the German viertel which was 1/4 Rhineland cubic foot = 471·6 c.i. So our gallon tended to increase towards the measure of 235·8 c.i., the half-velte. It could not increase further than 231 c.i. without deranging its water-wheat ratio with the corn-gallon, already increased, temporarily at least, under Henry VIII to 282 c.i. But the principal reason for 231 c.i. was that this was the capacity of a cylinder 7 inches in diameter and 6 inches deep. It has always been desirable that market-measures should be of dimensions easily remembered and readily gauged with a foot-rule. The wine-gallon of 231 c.i., confirmed by the new measures made by Elizabeth’s order, was afterwards known as Queen Anne’s gallon. It is to this day the fluid gallon of the United States, Canada and Ceylon.

The half-velte was the French galon, a word connected with galloie, jallaie, jalle, jarre, with our ‘jar’ and with ‘gauge,’ Fr. jauge. It may be mentioned that ‘velte’ sometimes meant a gauging-rod for wine-casks.

The wine-gallon was divided into 2 pots, or 4 quarts or 8 pints. The wine-pint = 16·57 fluid ounces = 5/6 Imperial pint.

Cask Measures

By 2 Henry VI (1423)—

Thus the hogshead (Flemish okshoofd, ox-head) was approximately 1/4 of the tun or fluid ton.

252 wine-gallons of 8 lb. = 2016 lb.

The customary beer-barrel contained, and still contains, 36 gallons (now Imperial gallons). It is probable that it was originally a half-hogshead = 31-1/2 or 32 gallons, and that it rose as an indirect consequence of the statutory rise of the Cwt. and Ton. (This will be explained under Corn Measure.)

The half-barrel of 18 gallons was called a Kilderkin, from the old Flemish word kinderkin, a little child. To it corresponded the Runlet of 18-1/2 wine-gallons (1483), the German Eimer or double Anker.

The quarter-barrel of 9 gallons is a Firkin, a word in which vierde, a fourth, replaces kinder; so that in the fifteenth century it was a Ferdekyn.

But the ale-barrel remained nominally at 32 gallons, its kilderkin at 16, its firkin at 8 gallons. This counterbalanced the increase of the ale-gallon to 282 c.i. How did this rise come about? The probable explanation is that the ale-gallon was really a corn-gallon of Henry VII and VIII; it disappeared for corn, but it remained for ale.

2. The Ale-gallon

Henry III proclaimed on his accession that, according to Magna Charta, there should be but one standard of measure and of weight throughout the realm, one measure of wine, one measure of ale, and one measure of corn.

There seems to be no information extant about the second of these measures; it was presumably the same as the corn-gallon. A statute of Henry VIII ordered the barrel of beer to be 36 gallons and that of ale 32 gallons, whence it may be presumed that the former were wine-gallons and the latter corn-gallons, 32 and 36 being taken as the whole numbers nearly proportionate to wine and corn measure, and admitting of the quarter-barrel being 8 gallons of ale and 9 of beer.[^[26]]

In 1496 (temp. Henry VII) a new corn-bushel was made = 2240 c.i., its gallon being 280 c.i. While it is possible that this increase was due to inaccurate casting, yet it might be that the new corn-gallon was intended to be on a water-wheat ratio with the wine-gallon, then = 224 c.i. (224 × 1-1/4 = 280), in the same way that the usual corn-gallon of 270 c.i. was in that ratio to the original 1/8 cubic foot gallon of 216 c.i. (216 × 1-1/4 = 270).[^[27]]

In 1531 the corn-gallon was increased to 282 c.i. But under Elizabeth the corn-gallon was restored to its old standard of 1/8 bushel = 2150·4/8 c.i. = 268·8 c.i. and the wine-gallon fixed at 231 c.i. At these standards both gallons stood until their unification in 1824. Confirmed by Queen Anne, they are known by her name.

But the corn-gallon of Henry VIII, = 282 c.i., remained as the Ale-gallon, probably because it had become the standard measure for malt.

The Quart and Pint

While the wine-pint was an eighth of a wine-gallon the common pint of England was the Ale-pint, an eighth of the Tudor Ale-gallon, which was 280 or 282 cubic inches and differed little from the Imperial gallon = 277·27 cubic inches. So the pint of ale in Tudor times differed little from an Imperial pint.

The Quart and Pint of Elizabeth preserved at the Standards Office are larger than Imperial measure, the Quart holding 40·53 ounces as compared with the 40 ounces of the Imperial quart; it is one-fourth of a gallon of 280 cubic inches, the Tudor ale-gallon.

3. Corn Measure

It has been seen that Henry III’s statute defined the gallon as containing 8 lb. of wine, and Edward I’s as containing 8 lb. of wheat. It is probable that the Magna Charta principle of ‘one weight, one measure’ prevented the mention of two different gallons, as it prevented the mention of two different pounds. But we know that there were two gallons. In England as in ancient Greece the unit of corn-measure was the fluid measure of the Talent increased in water-wheat ratio; so our cubic foot, taken as a wine-bushel of 8 wine-gallons, and increased one-fourth, gave the corn-bushel of 8 corn-gallons.

of which 1/8 = 270 c.i. was the corn-gallon.

It has been seen that the wine-gallon increased to 231 c.i., but the corn-standard remained for centuries (excepting a vagary temp. Henry VII and VIII) at very nearly its original value. It must be remembered how difficult it must have been to cast accurately a shallow brass pan 18-1/2 inches in diameter and only 8 inches deep; and this is probably the cause of the slight difference between the two standards of corn-measure, the London bushel and the Winchester bushel. These were simply variants, inevitable in making standard measures of the calculated capacity of the bushel = 2160 cubic inches = 1-1/4 cubic feet.

The London bushel = 2150·42 c.i.; the gallon = 268·8 c.i.

The Winchester bushel = 2178 c.i.; the gallon = 272-1/4 c.i.

The latter standard was so called, it is said, because its standard had been kept at Winchester since the time of King Edgar; it was, by 22 Chas. II (1670) and 10 Geo. III (1769), the standard measure for corn and other dry goods.

But by 13 Wm. III (1702) and by 5 Anne (1707) the London bushel was the standard, and this is the present corn-bushel of the United States. It is, however, commonly called, but inaccurately, a Winchester bushel.

4. The Quarter and the Chaldron

When the Cwt. was raised to 112 lb. and the Ton to 2240 lb. the Chaldron or ton-measure of wheat was increased by statute from 4 × 8 = 32 bushels to 36 bushels. One would think it would follow that the Quarter would be raised from 8 to 9 bushels. No, it was not raised, by law at least; so the corn-trade raised it themselves, thinking that evidently if a chaldron is now 36 bushels, for the quarter of it we must ask or give 9 bushels.

But this practice was apparently held to be an offence against the repeated royal declarations beginning with the 32 wheat-corn weight of the penny and ending with the ‘bushel which is the eighth part of the Quarter.’ While one statute raised the Chaldron to 36 bushels, another declared that its quarter was to remain at 8 bushels. In 15 Rich. II (1391) it is declared that ‘8 bushels striked should make the Quarter of corn nevertheless that divers people will not buy but 9 bushels for the Quarter.’

As statutes of 1436 and 1496 repeated this prohibition of any increase of the quarter one may presume that the forbidden practice continued, the increased quarter being called a Vat. But there was another way of evading these statutes; the old story with bad legislation; Fatta la lege, trovato l’inganno. It became in many parts customary to give, not a long-quarter, but a long-bushel of 9 gallons, so that 8 long-bushels would make the new quarter-chaldron. It was possibly a relic of this practice which caused the Chester corn-measure to become 70 lb., roughly 62-1/2 lb. × 9/8 = 70·3 lb. Cheshire perhaps benefited by its neighbourhood to Lancashire, which was specially exempted by 13 Rich. II from the penalties for offences against the unity of weights and measures, ‘because in that county it hath always been used to have greater measure than in any other part of the realm.’[^[28]] Yet long-bushels are sometimes the striked equivalents of heaped measure.

But in most parts of the country the attempts to correct stupid legislation were abandoned, and so the Chaldron of 36 bushels fell almost out of use and the Quarter ceased to be a quarter of any measure. In 1707 Bishop Fleetwood (‘Chronicon preciosum’) could only say ‘doubtless a Quarter is a quarter or fourth part of some load or weight.’ And there is a story that Lord Kelvin, asking the head of the Standards Office (giving evidence before a Royal Commission on Weights and Measures) of what a Quarter was the quarter, failed to obtain any light on the subject. And he himself did not know.

But since the corn-trade brought back from North America the old ton of 20 centals, the quarter has found its long-lost father. The freight-ton of ships, 40 cubic feet of cargo, contains 32 bushels (at 1-1/4 cubic feet to the bushel), that is 4 Quarters or 2000 lb. of average wheat = 20 centals.

5. Coal Measure

The Chaldron of 36 bushels is used for the sale of coke and in Northumberland for coal.

A ‘keel’ of coal, i.e. the load of the Tyneside lighter known as a ‘keel,’ was, up till the fifteenth century, 20 ‘chaldres,’ the measure of 20 old tons:

When the old Chaldron became illegal it gradually gave place to the new ton and to the new chaldron. The Newcastle chaldron was 2 statute chaldrons = 72 bushels. The modern keel of coal is 21·2 tons = 16 statute chaldrons of 36 bushels = 8 Newcastle chaldrons. This double chaldron is then 72 bushels, or, as 1/8 of the keel, = 21·2 tons, it is 53 cwt., and it is divided into 3 Fother of 17-2/3 cwt. = 1966 lb. or nearly the old ton of 2000 lb. Thus the Newcastle fother is nearly the old ton, and the keel of 24 fothers or old tons has taken the place of the sixteenth-century keel of 20 old tons.

In the eighteenth century the coal-bushel was slightly changed from London or Winchester standard. 12 Anne (1714) ordered a special coal-bushel. It was defined as containing a Winchester bushel and a quart, 33 instead of 32 quarts = 2218 cubic inches, and coal was to be sold by the chalder of 36 such bushels, heaped.

This new bushel was 1/8 inch more in diameter and in depth than the old standard; it arose probably from a faulty casting. It is remarkable, inasmuch as its capacity is almost exactly that of the Edinburgh firlot and also of the Imperial bushel instituted a century later.

The Chaldron survives for coke. When coal is coked at the gas-works it swells, so that a ton of coal, = about 3/4 chaldron, yields about a chaldron of coke.

Heaped Measure

It has been seen that in 1392 the bushel was to be measured ‘striked’ and not heaped. Yet the love of extra weight or measure is so ingrained in human nature that it persisted, at least in retail transactions. With a pan-shaped bushel more than twice as broad as deep, heaping increased the measure by not less than one-fourth. With a drum-shaped bushel, its depth equal to its diameter, the increase of heaped over striked measure would be about an eighth, so that a bushel of wheat would weigh about 70 lb. instead of 62 lb. Heaped measure was made illegal in 1835.

It is possible that some long-bushels (as that of Chester = 70 lb.) were originally, or actually, heaped bushels.

6. The Imperial Gallon

In 1824 some of our measures were reorganised, and among the changes was the unification of wine and corn measure. The better concordance of capacity with weight by a single gallon containing exactly 10 lb. of water at ordinary temperature has been a great advantage. It has enlarged the decimal capabilities of our system without impairing its convenient and popular series of capacity units. It is indeed an advantage that the slight increase of the corn-gallon now gives a weight of 64 lb. good wheat to the bushel, so that the pint corresponds very exactly to a pound of wheat.

Yet it must be remembered that our brethren of the United States, not usually deemed unprogressive, get on very well with Queen Anne’s wine-gallon and corn-gallon.

The new gallon holds exactly 10 lb. of pure water at 62° or 277·274 cubic inches.

The bushel is of the capacity of 2218·19 cubic inches. It holds 80 lb. of pure water.

The change from the old corn-gallon was very slight, increasing it by only 3 per cent., from 268·8 to 277·27 c.i. (and rather less from the Winchester gallon of 270 c.i.), so that the bushel formerly holding 62-1/2 lb. of wheat now holds 64 lb.

Wine-measure was increased by almost exactly 20 per cent., from 231 c.i. to 277·27 c.i., so that a gallon of wine is contained in 6 customary bottles, instead of 5 as formerly, or as at present in the United States.

Bushel measures are of two shapes: the drum-shape, 15 inches diameter by 12-2/4 inches deep, and the standard shape (that of the old corn-measure), 18-1/2 inches diameter by 8-1/4 inches deep.

Nothing has been changed in the excellent octonary series of measures, pint, gallon, bushel, quarter (eight of the first making one of the second and so on), with binary sub-units—some of them general, as the quart; others local, as the coomb; and some more or less obsolete, as the tuffet, famous in nursery rhyme.

Measures of Capacity

These measures can be used for either dry goods or fluids. The smaller measures below a pint are used for fluids.

Fluid Measures

The institution of the Imperial gallon, while increasing corn-measure by 3 per cent., had less effect on Ale-measure. The Ale-pint, being 1/8 of the Ale-gallon of 282 cubic inches, was somewhat larger than the new Imperial pint, holding about 20-1/4 ounces; so the change to the Imperial pint of 20 ounces was practically imperceptible.

The Gill is officially, according to southern custom, a 1/4 pint; but in Lancashire and the north it is a half-pint. The name Gill, like the Jug synonym for Pint, is part of a popular series of names for beer or spirit measures. Jug is the feminine of Jack, with which name Gill is familiarly associated.

The customary capacity of wine-bottles is 1/6 gallon = 26-2/3 ounces. So six customary bottles go to the gallon, and a customary ‘dozen’ of wine or spirits = 2 gallons.

In India the gallon of canteen-spirit, rum or arrack, is reckoned as 48 drams, each 1/8 bottle or 3-1/3 fluid ounces.

7. Medicinal Fluid Measures

The Imperial gallon, as 10 lb. of water = 160 fluid ounces, each of 437-1/2 grains of water at standard temperature.

Its eighth part, the Pint, contains 20 ounces weight or 20 fluid-ounces measure. It is so divided on druggists’ glass measures. The fluid ounce is divided into 8 fluid drachms, each of 60 minims, approximately fluid grains.

In the United States, where the old wine-gallon of 231 cubic inches is retained, the old wine-pint of 16 fluid ounces is used. 231 c.i. × 252·458 (grains of water in 1 c.i.) gives—

The fluid ounce is divided as in England into 8 fluid drachms, of 60 minims.

[26]. For a long time the difference between ale and beer was that beer was hopped.

[27]. It has been suggested that the 280 c.i. corn-gallon was constructed so as to have Averdepois-Troy ratio to the 231 c.i. wine-gallon (1·215 : 1). But the latter had not at the time risen to 231 c.i., and it is more probable that the ratio was that of water to wheat, the pound-pint ratio.

[28]. Curiously Lancashire still uses the Cheshire acre, and in some parts a pound of butter is a pound + the weight of 2 pennies, formerly the heavy Georgian ounce-pennies, now the lighter bronze coins.

CHAPTER IX
THE MINT-POUNDS

1. The Saxon or Tower Pound

At some time before the Norman Conquest the Marc of Cologne was brought to England, probably only as the mint-standard of the later English kings, for the 16-ounce Roman pound was already long-established as the commercial weight.

The standard of the Cologne marc has never varied much.

Its mean weight = 3608 grains; when doubled it made a pound = 7216 grains, with an ounce = 451 grains. This pound is almost identical with the greater rotl of Al-Mamūn, 1/100 of the cantar = 102·92 lb.; and the old Prussian pound of Cologne standard was 1/100 of the Prussian centner = 103·11 lb.

The Norman Conquest made no change; the Saxon pound became the Tower pound, the King’s treasury or mint being in the Tower of London. The Tower pound of standard silver was coined into 240 silver pennies, which, at 22-1/2 grains, their weight down to the time of Edward III, gives 5400 grains for the pound and 450 grains for the ounce. An actual weight = 5404 grains was found in the Pyx chamber in 1842.

The shilling, of 12 pence, was until Tudor times only money of account. But it was also a weight of account, the pound being either 12 ounces of 20 pennyweight, or 20 shillings of 12 pennyweight.

‘When a quarter of wheat is sold for 12 pence, the wastel-bread of a farthing shall weigh 6 li. and 16 s. But bread cocket of a farthing shall weigh more by 2 s.’ (Assize of Bread, 51 Henry III.) That is, the farthing loaf shall weigh 6-16/20 Tower lb. = 5-1/4 averdepois lb., and the second sort 24 dwt. or 1-1/5 Tower ounce more.

Here is an instance of the confusion caused by making bread, like gold, silver and medicines, saleable only by the royal pound. This system of a peculiar pound for bread lasted till the eighteenth century.

Under Edward I the halfpenny loaf weighed 40 s., that is 2 lb. Tower = a little more than 1-1/2 lb. averdepois.

Moneyers and goldsmiths divided the dwt. or original weight of the silver penny, for fine weighing, on the Dutch system, that is into 2 mayles, 4 ferlings 8 troisken, 16 deusken, 32 azen (aces). This would account for the 32 wheat-corns which the silver penny was always supposed to weigh, however many pence the mint struck from the pound of silver.

The mayle and ferling (Fr. maille and felin) were the mint-names for the silver halfpenny and farthing.

Under the gradual influence of Troy weight the dwt. Tower was also divided into 24 parts or grains. It was so divided in the time of Edward III.

It must be remembered that there was absolutely no definition of Tower weight, nothing but the usual proclamation about the 32 wheat-corns, a convenient definition, as they still appeared to balance the penny when it had fallen to half its original weight.

2. The Troy Pound

The pound of Troie is mentioned in the time of Henry IV, and in the next reign goldsmiths were ordered to use la libre de Troy, though by 9 Henry V mint-rates were still stated in la libre de Tour. By 2 Henry VI the price of standard silver is fixed at 30s. la livre du Troie, which means that 12 × 30 pennies of 15 grains were being coined from a pound of 5400 grains, evidently still a Tower pound. Notwithstanding the change of name, the Troy pound was not proclaimed as the royal pound until 1527, when by 18 Henry VII ‘the pounde Towre shall be no more used, but all manner of golde and sylver shall be wayed by the pounde Troye which excedith the pound Towre in weight 3 quarters of the ounce.’ But the Troy pound had been used concurrently with the old mint-pound for a long time, and there had been two standards at the mint.

According to an anonymous writer in 1507 (quoted in Snelling’s ‘View of the Silver Coin and Coinage,’ 1762) ‘it is a right great untruth and deceit that any such pound Toweres should be occupied, for that thereby the merchant is deceived subtilly and the mint master is thereby profited.’

There is no doubt that after the conquest of England by Henry Tudor a cloud of deceit came over the coinage, deceit only ended by Elizabeth’s establishment of the coinage on an honest basis. Comparing the declaration of weights, measures, and coinage by Henry III in 1266 with that of 12 Henry VII in 1496, the latter does not show to advantage. It orders—

That every Pound contain 12 ounces of Troy weight and every ounce contain 20 sterlings and every Sterling be of the weight of 32 corns of wheat that grew in the midst of the ear according to the old law of the said land.

Meanwhile the Troy ounce of silver was being coined, not into 20, but into 40 sterlings or pennies. But each of these was supposed to weigh 32 wheat-corns just as they did when they were really 20 to the ounce, albeit a Tower ounce.

Whence came the Troy Pound?

It is probable that the name of the King’s Troy pound came from the marc of Troyes, but it is certain that the English Troy pound no more came from Troyes than the ‘pound Toweres’ came from Tours.

There were four principal marcs in France:

The marc of Troyes doubled made the livre poids de marc, the Paris standard = 7554 grains.

That of La Rochelle, the marc d’Angleterre, would appear from its name to have been, originally at least, the marc of Cologne, Tower standard, but its standard corresponds almost exactly to the marc of Castille. I make inquiries at La Rochelle, and am informed that the La Rochelle mint had at one time been coining for Spain, perhaps at the time of Plantagenet dominion in the South.

The marc of Limoges coincides nearly exactly with 8 ounces averdepois of Plantagenet times; it will be remembered that Limoges was for a long time an English Plantagenet city.

The marc of Tours is of southern rather than northern type.

None of these marcs seem to have any relation with the Troy weight of England.

There appears to have been in Northern France, England and Scotland, about the eighth century, a heavy 16-ounce pound of nearly 8500 grains, possibly related, through the Russian pound, with the miná of the Greek-Asiatic talent = 8415 grains. This was probably the heavy pound which survived in Guernsey up till the eighteenth century; and perhaps other pounds said to be of 18 ounces, such as that of Cumberland up to a generation ago, were really survivals of this heavy northern pound. Whether this pound dwindled spontaneously, or whether it was superseded by the pound derived, either directly from the lesser Arabic rotl with an ounce = 480-1/4 grains, or indirectly from an ounce of 10 dirhems, of about 48 grains, is difficult to say. All that is known is that there is a family of pounds usually known as Troy with an ounce varying between 483 and 472 grains; that the pennies of Charlemagne averaging 25 grains correspond to an ounce of about 500 grains, possibly more, which is certainly not modern French Troy, and that many Saxon pennies of about that time were much heavier than those of the times nearer to the Conquest. The Northern Troy pounds show the following variations:

The variation in these Troy pounds seems due to their ounces being 10 dirhems of 48 grains, more or less; the lightest ounce, that of French Troy, being 10 dirhems of 47·1 grains, the same as the dirhem of which the Provençal ounce, 377 grains, contained 8.

Our Troy pound, while taking its name, like the Scots and Dutch pound, from the Troyes marc, took its standard from some pound of full weight, possibly from the Bremen pound, introduced by the Hanse merchants. Its exact standard appears due to the influence of the averdepois pound, and this would explain—

How the Averdepois Pound was of 7000 Grains.

This division into 7000 grains was not arbitrary, but it was due to the desire to give it as simple a ratio as possible to the new Troy pound. It was found by a Parliamentary Committee in 1758 to weigh 7000 of those grains into which the Troy pound had always been divided, necessarily into 5760 of them (12 oz. × 20 dwt. × 24 grs.). Now it seems probable that when the Troy pound was adopted for mint purposes its weight might be modified, on the advice of goldsmiths and merchants, so as to give it a convenient relation to the old-established averdepois pound. Supposing the new pound were of the Bremen standard, 7693 grains, of which 12 ounces = 5769·6 grains, then its weight would be to that of averdepois as 5769·6 to 7000, or as 5760 to 6987·8. To make the proportion 5760 to 7000 it would be necessary to decrease the weight of the Troy pound by about 8 grains or to increase that of the averdepois pound by about 10 grains. It is probable that the latter alternative was adopted, and that the averdepois pound was raised in such proportion that it now weighed 7000 grains of the Troy pound = 5760 grains. This accounts for the rise in the weight of the averdepois standard between Plantagenet and Elizabethan times, making the ounce = 437-1/2 grains instead of the 437 grains of the Roman ounce.

It is not improbable that the change of mint-standard from Tower to Troy was due to the very inconvenient ratio of the Tower pound to the averdepois pound. The mint-pound being necessarily divided into 12 ounces of 20 pennyweight of 24 parts or grains = 5760 parts, the ratio of the Tower and averdepois pounds was 5400 to nearly 7000, or 5760 : 7453, the latter figure being about the number of Tower grains = 0·937 grain, contained in the original averdepois pound. The introduction of a new pound, which by slight modification in either it or the averdepois pound would give the simpler ratio of 5760 to 7000, would probably be most welcome to the mercantile community.

In Teutonic countries the usual system of dividing the pounds was as follows:

The Latin nations followed the ancient Roman system of dividing the ounce:

Mint-pound of 12 oz. × 6 sextulæ × 24 siliquæ = 1728 siliquæ, the ounce being of 6 × 24 = 144 siliquæ or carats, and the carat of 4 grains, giving 576 grains in an ounce.

In Southern France:

Pound of 16 oz. × 8 ternau × 3 denié × 24 gran.

There we see the scruple becomes a pennyweight, and the obolus or half-scruple becomes a halfpenny.

In Northern France:

Mint-marc 8 oz. × 8 gros × 3 deniers × 24 grains.

Medicinal lb. of 12 oz. × 8 drachmes × 3 scrupules × 24 grains.

Commercial lb. of 16 oz. × 8 gros × 72 grains.

In this system, common to France, Spain, Portugal, Florence, and Rome, the ounce is divided into 576 parts or grains, while the Troy ounce of the rest of Europe is of 480 grains. This makes the Latin grain lighter.

In the medicinal pound, more or less international throughout the West, the 24 Scruples of the ounce are grouped into 8 drachms of 3 scruples.

It may be concluded that the English Troy pound was a Northern weight with its ounce of 480 instead of 576 parts. It has no direct connexion but in name with the marc of Troyes. It probably came to us as an apothecary’s and goldsmith’s pound, and in the latter, the Latin factors 24 scruples × 20 grains were transposed for mint purposes so as to preserve the ancient pennyweight 1/20 ounce of the Tower pound. But in the apothecary’s Troy pound the ounce remained divided into 24 scruples (8 drachms of 3 scruples) each of 20 grains as in other countries except France, &c.

The story of the goldsmiths’ Carat and Grain will be found in [Chapter XX], that of the Provençal weights, from which the French Troy was derived, in [Chapter XVIII].

3. The Pride and Fall of Troy

The myth of the 32 wheat-corns which formed the basis of the Tower pound = 5400 grains, passed to the Troy pound = 5760 grains, and this deliberate fiction lasted till the time of Elizabeth and perhaps later. It did little harm as regards these mint-pounds, but its application to the Averdepois pound, alleged to be an offshoot of the royal pound, either as 25 shillings, that is 300 pennyweights of 32 wheat-corns, or as 15 ounces Troy, or at a later period as 16 ounces Troy, produced a mental obliquity which is most lamentable.

The jury of merchants and goldsmiths appointed in 1574 to examine the ancient standards, and construct a new set, declared that ‘the one sorte of weight nowe in use is commonlie called the troie weight and that other sorte thereof is also commonlie called the avoir de poiz weight, and further they say that both the saide consiste compounded frome thauncient Englishe penye named a sterling rounde and unclipped which penny is limeted to waie twoo and thirtie grains of wheate in the midest of the eare and twentie of those pence make an oz. and twelf of those ounc make one pound troie.’ They go on to ‘saie that the said twoo sortes of weights doe differ in weight the one from the other three ounces troie at the pounde weight, for the pounde weight troie doth consiste onlie of xii oz. troie and the lb. weight of avoir de poiz weight dothe consiste of fiftene ounc troie.’

Thomas Hylles, in his ‘Arte of Vulgar Arithmeticke’ (1600), showed himself emancipated from the superstition of troy weight so far as to say:

‘15 ounces of Troy weight should by the statute make 1 pound of haverdepoise, but the same pound weyeth commonly but 14 ounces 1/2 Troy, 14 ounces 3/5 at the uttermost.’

(14-1/2 oz. troy = 6960 grs.; 14-3/5 oz. = 7008 grs.)

But he unfortunately went on to say that ‘of things liquid and dry 1 pound of Troy weight maketh a pinte in measure,’ not seeing that 12 oz. troy = only 13·16 oz. averdepois, while a wine-pint contained 16-2/3 ounces of water, and a corn-pint close on 16 ounces of wheat or 20 of water.

But the ignorance and superstition engendered by troy weight was just as bad in 1702 as in 1600 or even in 1500, as shown by the following utterance of an eighteenth-century scientist:

Troy weight, whereby bread, gold, silver, apothecaries’ wares etc. are weighed containing only 12 ounces in the pound, each ounce 20 pennyweight each pennyweight 24 grams. This seems to have been the most ancient weight by its name, as derived from the famous city of Troy, from whence Brutus and his people are said to have descended and to have called London Troy-Novant or New Troy.

So said J. Ralphson, F.R.S., in his ‘Mathematical Dictionary’ (London, 1702). And then he continued:

The second and more common weight is called Avoirdupois, being fuller and larger weight than the other, for it contains 16 ounces or 128 drams, viz. 384 scruples, viz. 7680 grains, by this are weighed all kinds of grocery ware and base metals, as iron, copper and brass, as also hemp, flax, rosin, pitch, tar &c.

A century later we find not much improvement in the idea of the pounds Troy and Averdepois.

‘The pound or 7680 grains avoirdupois equals 7000 grains troy and hence 1 grain troy equals 1·097 avoirdupois’ (Rees’ ‘Encyclopædia,’ 1819). This is an example of the utter muddle the Troy pound had made in the minds of otherwise intelligent people.

Similar pedantic efforts were continued, well into the nineteenth century, to represent the Troy pound as the sole standard of England and the averdepois pound only respectable as an offshoot of the royal pound used for vulgar purposes.

The Assize of Bread

Such fictions were helped by the old statutes which compelled the sale, first by Tower and then by Troy weight, of bread as well as of gold, silver, and medicines. And confusion was made worse by the use for a long period of a third weight for bread, the Amsterdam or Scotch troy pound.

The peck loaf, supposed to be that produced from a peck of flour (16 pints), was to weigh 16 of these pounds = 17 lbs. 6 oz. averdepois, the quartern loaf 4 = 4 lb. 5 oz., and the pint loaf (to be sold at a penny when wheat was 4s. a bushel or 32s. a quarter) was to weigh one pound = 17 oz. 6 drams averdepois. The periodical Assize of Bread fixed the price of the peck loaf.

It appears then that the pound of bread was = 7600 grains, its ounce = 475 grains, which was about the Scottish (and Dutch) troy standard. It was probably adopted as coinciding with the weight of bread supposed to be produced from a pint of flour and as keeping up the old superstition that bread must be sold by troy weight. As some persons in authority did not share the stupidity of those who considered the averdepois pound to be 16 troy ounces, the Scottish 16-ounce pound of troy standard was imported for the purpose.

This weight was abolished by 8 Anne (1710) and the sliding scale was put in the averdepois equivalent.

The Assize of Bread was abolished in 1815, but traces of it remain in the name ‘quartern loaf,’ although this now means a loaf of 4 imperial pounds. It may also mean a loaf weighing the quarter of a 16-lb. stone.

The Disappearance of the Troy Pound

In 1841 a Royal Commission on Weights and Measures recommended the abolition of the Troy pound as ‘wholly useless,’ retaining its ounce provisionally for the use of bullion merchants, pending ‘the removal of the troy scale.’ This recommendation was not carried out until 1878, when the Troy pound disappeared, except of course in almanacks and books for the instruction of youth—but the Troy ounce still survives at the mint, and consequently in the bullion market; and it is virtually forced on druggists in spite of the Medical Council. Troy weight was abolished by the Pharmacopœia Committee in 1864, Imperial weight being alone recognised; yet the Board of Trade keeps up the Apothecaries’ ounce of 480 grains. Troy weight has fallen; but, like many other superstitions, it dies hard.

CHAPTER X
THE CUBIC FOOT AND THE TON REGISTER

The cubic foot and the cubic inch are the usual measures of solidity. The cubic yard is used as a measure of masonry, earthwork, or reservoirs of water.

The cubic foot has many points of concordance with weights and with measures of capacity, and is the basis of ship and cargo measurement.

The definition of the Imperial gallon as 277·274 cubic inches, the volume of 10 lb. of water at 62°, a pound of water measuring 27·7274 cubic inches, led to attempts to determine accurately the weight of a cubic inch and of a cubic foot of water. These experiments are interesting in consequence of the recognition, in 1685,[^[29]] that the cubic foot of water weighed approximately 1000 ounces, and of the probability that this weight of water in Roman ounces, = 437 grains, was the source of our Imperial system. It has already been shown how difficult it is either to construct accurately a measure containing a certain weight of water or conversely to determine the weight of water in a standard measure.[^[30]]

The statute definition of the cubic inch of water as = 252·458 grains at 62° corresponds to 62·326 lb., or 997·21 ounces, for the cubic foot. Reduction of these weights to the standard of maximum density of water at 39·2° increases the weight of the cubic inch by 0·29 grain, and of the cubic foot by 1·1 ounce, making it = 62·4 lb. or 998·3 ounces. An Order in Council of 1889 gives 252·286 grains as the weight of the cubic inch of water. But the exact weight is uncertain, and the 1824 statute definition seems to be as accurate as the more recent determinations, all different.

It may be taken that the cubic foot of water weighs very approximately—

And 1000 ounces of water at the original weight of the averdepois ounce, of Roman standard = 437 grains, would weigh 999·5 of such ounces, at 62° in air.

Practically measures of capacity need only approximate coincidence with standards; they are used for convenience in order to avoid weighing, especially in retail trade. Corn and many other kinds of produce are more conveniently measured than weighed, the average weight being ascertained, if desired, by a sample bushel.

Fluids may also require corrections for temperature when bought or sold by measure. Water increases in volume 1 per 1000 between 39° and 61°; and another 1 per 1000 between 61° and 70°; other fluids have their peculiar coefficients of expansion.

Allowing then for small temperature-corrections, the cubic foot may be taken as equal to 62-1/2 lb. or 1000 ounces of water, and at this sufficiently approximate standard it becomes the basis of a series of measures for ship and other purposes.

The Ton Register

The capacity of ships has for centuries been reckoned in tons. The term arose from the custom, in French and other wine ports, to take as the unit of cargo-bulk the tun of wine usually contained in four hogsheads, each of 63 wine-gallons. The number of hogsheads divided by 4 gave the tonnage to be charged.

This cargo-ton, the tonneau d’encombrement, was equal to 42 French cubic feet = 51 English cubic feet.

The Ton Register appears to have arisen in the ports of Northern Europe. There the unit was usually the skippund (ship-pound) of about 360 lb. for wool and light goods. But the Last was also a wide-spread, though variable, measure; in the Baltic trade it was usually reckoned at 11-1/4 quarters of wheat = 90 bushels or 5400 lb. In England it was usually 10 quarters = 80 bushels = 5000 lb. Now this bulk of wheat measures about 100 cubic feet, so 100 English cubic feet has become the unit adopted in all maritime countries, as the Ton Register. In France it is called the tonneau de jaugage and is taken as = 2·83 cubic metres.

A ship of 2000 tons register is of a capacity = 200,000 cubic feet below decks. The register tonnage is thus obtained:

Mean length × 0·94 of maximum beam × depth from upper deck to keel, the measure being taken inside, and in feet. The product is cubic feet, which divided by 100 gives register tonnage.

In France these measurements have to be made in metres; the product in cubic metres is divided by 0·38 to get tonnage.

Net tonnage, as distinguished from gross tonnage, is the latter less the space occupied by cabins below deck, by engines and bunkers, in short all that is not ‘hold.’

This deduction gives the space available for cargo, a very large proportion in a sailing-ship, a very small proportion in a steam-yacht or tug.

The Cargo Ton is usually reckoned at 40 cubic feet; the space occupied by 20 centals = 4 quarters of wheat, or 25 centals of water.

A steamship of 4500 tons register may be 3000 tons net; as each of these net tons will contain 2-1/2 tons of cargo of about the same weight as wheat, after allowing for cases, dunnage, &c., the ship may be described as carrying 7500 tons dead-weight. Of course, this would only apply to goods of medium weight; not to iron rails or to ore, which could only be taken as a limited part of the cargo, the rest of the space being either filled with light goods or remaining empty.

The ship-owner has the choice of charging freight by measurement, usually at 40 c. ft. to the ton, or by the ton weight for metal and other heavy goods.

Concordance of Capacity, Weight and Measurement

Table of Volume and Weight of Water

at Different Temperatures

[29]. ‘Some Gentlemen at Oxford in 1685 determined the weight of a cubic foot of spring water, or 1728 solid inches, to be 1000 ounces averdepois.’—Kelly, Metrology, 1816.

[30]. For this reason the custodians of the metric system have abandoned the cubic decimetre of water as the basis of measures either of capacity or of weight. The kilogramme is now, like our pound, a certain metal standard, and the litre is a measure containing, more or less exactly, a kilogramme of water. A perfect litre standard contains 1000 grammes of water at 39·2°; but 1·1 gramme less at 62°, 2 grammes less at 70°, and 3·3 grammes less at 80°, a very frequent summer temperature. For exact correspondence of measure with weight, corrections are always required whether on the imperial or on the metric system.

CHAPTER XI
SCOTS, IRISH, AND WELSH MEASURES AND
WEIGHTS

1. Scotland

The Scots system was distinctly North German, influenced by English measures.

Linear Measures

The standard of length was the Scots Ell = 37·06 English inches. Originally three Rhineland feet at 12·353 inches, it was always described as containing 37 inches. The inch, at 1/37 of the ell, was slightly longer, by less than 2 in 1000, than the English inch. The penalty edicted in 1685 against the use of any other foot but that of 12 inches, while ‘three foot and an inch’ were a Scots ell, seems to show that a foot equal to one-third of an ell may have been used.

The rod or ‘fall’ was 6 ells; the acre was 160 square rods = 1·26 acre, and very nearly equal to the French arpent, which was equal to the Roman heredium. This is, however, a mere coincidence. The Scots acre comes, like the English acre, from North Germany. The type of the Scots acre is seen in the Jück (yoke) of Oldenburg; this field-measure is 160 square ruthen; each ruthe is 18 feet square, presumably 18 Rhineland feet = 6 Scots ells, originally; though now of a lower standard which makes the Jück = only 1·12 acre instead of the 1·26 acre of Rhineland standard.

Weights

There was an ancient weight, the Tron pound, of variable standard, about 20 Scots ounces. But its actual weight appears to have been 9622 grains, which is exactly 20 ounces of the original Arabic ounce = 481·18 grains. This was abolished by the Act of 1618, which ordered ‘that the standards be kept, two firlots by Linlithgow, the stone weight by Lanark, the ell by Edinburgh, and the pint by Stirling, as of old.’

The Lanark stone was 16 lb. of Scots Trois weight. An inscription on the standard still extant states that it was equal to 15 lb. 14 oz. English Troy, that is to the fictive long Troy pound of 7680 grains. The Scots pound, = 7609 grains, was divided into 16 ounces = 475·5 grains, divided into 16 drops.

The stone was blunderingly described (1618) as ‘the French Trois Stone containing sixteen Trois ounces.’ But it had nothing to do with French weight (in which the ounce = 472·12 grains); its standard was of the Dutch Troy (Trooisch) class, coinciding very closely with that of the Amsterdam pound = 7925 grains, the ounce = 476·5 grains.

When the 7600-grains lb. came to England as the standard of the Assize of Bread, it was known as the Scots or Dutch pound.

An Act of James I (1410), ‘That a Stone be made for weighing fifteen Trois pounds and divided into sixteen Scots pounds,’ leads to a suspicion that there was another Scots pound, of Rhineland standard; for 16 pounds or double marks of Cologne are very approximately equal to 15 long Troy pounds of English standard.

Troy oz., 480 grs. × 16/15 = 450 grs. = Tower oz.

One may thus surmise that the royal pound of Scotland, like that of England up to Tudor times, was of Cologne or Tower standard, and was superseded in course of time by the Amsterdam or Scots Trois pound.

Measures of Capacity

In 1410 it was ordered:

That the Boll be divided into 4 Firlots, and contain 29 inches within the boords, and above 27 and an half-inch even over, and in deepness 19 inches; that the Firlot contain in breadth even over 16 inches under and above within the boords, and in deepness 9 inches; that the Firlot contain 2 gallons and a pint, and the Pint to weigh, of the water of Tay 41 ounces or 2 pounds 9 ounces; so the Gallon weighs 20 pounds 8 ounces, the Firlot 41 pounds and the Boll 164 pounds.

This seems as clear as the water of Tay; unfortunately the three firlots mentioned in the first half of the quotation are three different firlots.

There is also a difficulty about the pint. An Act of James VI gives ‘the pint of Stirling two pounds and nine ounces Trois, of clear water,’ the same weight as above. But another and previous Act of the same king (1618) orders ‘that the Pint weigh three pounds seven ounces Trois of the running water of the Water of Leith’; and this pint is also called the Stirling Pint, Jug or Stoup, so there were two pints, as well as several firlots.

Of the two pints, the standard of one is still extant, which we will call the Stirling Jug or larger pint. It contains 104·2 cubic inches = 60·1 ounces of water, almost exactly 3 Imperial pints, and was 55 ounces or 3 lb. 7 oz. Scots of water. It was not an aliquot part of any of the firlots, but was itself a standard basis of measure, of which the firlot might be 18, 19, 21-1/4, &c. There is little doubt that it was one of the ‘Kanne’ of North Germany (Du. stoop); these kanne vary at the present day between 2·83 pints in Bremen and 3·2 pints in Hamburg. There was in Prussia until quite recently the Metze of 6 pints or 120·8 ounces, almost exactly twice the larger Stirling Jug.

The other pint, of 41 Scots ounces = 44-1/2 English ounces or 2-1/4 pints, was not a standard measure. It was merely a divisional unit, one-sixteenth of the above-described wine firlot containing 41 lb. Scots, or 44-1/2 English pounds, of water. This firlot was divided into 2 gallons = 20-1/2 lb. Scots, or 22-1/4 English pounds; and the gallon into 8 pints of 41 ounces Scots.

What was the origin of this firlot, or rather of the Boll, of which it was a fourth? There is only one measure with which it has any affinity: the half-Cargo of Marseilles,[^[31]] divided like it, sexdecimally. The two series run thus:

In the next reign, that of James II, about 1450, another Firlot appeared. It was to be ‘a general Mett, according to the Pint and Quart formerly given to the Burgh of Stirling for an universal standard, whereof each Firlot to contain eighteen Pints ... and that none use another measure.’

Which of the Stirling pints was the Standard? The smaller pint of 41 Scots ounces of water, or the Jug, the larger pint, of 55 ounces?

In this case it was certainly the larger pint; for 18 pints of this standard are very nearly equal to a firlot containing a Rhineland cubic foot of water, 1000 Troy ounces = 1886 cubic inches. Except the slight difference between Amsterdam and Scots Troy weight, this firlot was 62-1/2 lb. Scots, just as the English cubic foot was 62-1/2 lb. averdepois. It was 18 pints of 104·2 cubic inches = 1875·6 cubic inches = 54 Imperial pints or 6·76 Imperial gallons. This corresponds very closely to the Himt or cubic Rhineland-foot measure of North Germany, actually = 6·85 gallons.

This was a corn-firlot, and I recognise in it the firlot mixed up with the wine-firlot and only rescued by its stated dimensions corresponding to a capacity so different from the calculated contents of the latter. The dimensions given correspond to a capacity of 1809 cubic inches, a considerable divergence, but the old custom of ordering the gauge of bushel-measures in inches either whole or with simple fractions often caused considerable divergence from the calculated standard of capacity.

Progress through the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland reveals to us more firlots, with the same anxiety which has been seen in English statutes for unity of standards, with the same attempts to conceal their plurality beneath plausible wording. Under James VI (and I of England) the Parliaments were anxious ‘that the measure and firlot of Linlithgow should be the only firlot for all his Majesty’s liedges.’ It was therefore ordered that the Pint of Stirling be 2 lb. 9 oz. Trois of clear water, and the Firlot of Linlithgow 19 pints.

It has been seen that the Act of James I which ordered the wine-firlot to be 41 lb. in 2 gallons of 20 lb. 8 oz. also stated that it was to contain 2 gallons and a pint; thus making it in one line 16 pints (of 41 ounces), in another 17 pints. The Act of James II ordered the firlot (presumably a corn-firlot) to be 18 pints, of 55 ounces. And then the Act of James VI made the firlot 19 pints, of 41 ounces = 48-3/4 lb. Scots or 53 English pounds. This capacity corresponds approximately to the Schepel of Oldenburg, now = 50 lb.

Yet another Act of James VI (1616) finds the Linlithgow standard of the Firlot to be true and to contain ‘twentie are pincts and ane mutchkin of just Sterline Jug and measure,’ but, in order to put an end to heaped measure, it orders a new firlot for malt, barley and oats, containing 31 pints Stirling Jug, and that the pint weigh 3 lb. 7 oz. Trois of the running water of the Water of Leith. Thus different Acts order firlots of 16, 17, 18, 19, 21-1/4, 31, pints; sometimes the pint is to be 41 ounces Scots, sometimes 55 ounces, and sometimes it is not mentioned which.

The firlot of 21-1/4 pints was probably an imported measure found to contain that number of pints; 21-1/4 × 104·2 gives 2214 cubic inches, = 7·98 Imperial gallons, for its capacity, a measure coinciding very closely with the Anker, which varies between 7·83 gallons in Oldenburg and 8 gallons in Lubeck (and 7·95 gallons in the Cape Colony). The Boll of 4 firlots = 4 bushels was equal to the Lubeck Ohm; and the term Anker was used in Scotland for the potato-firlot.

This firlot of 21-1/4 pints became the Edinburgh firlot; and it happens to coincide almost exactly with the Imperial bushel. It being fixed at 21-1/4 Stirling pints (of 104·2 c.i.) when 20-1/2 pints would have made it 2136 c.i., almost exactly the old English bushel (2150 c.i.), shows that it was not influenced by the latter; it was clearly an independent measure imported by trade. Its series was quaternary:

The lippy, as its sixteenth, came to mean a sixteenth generally. The word is a diminutive of the O.E. ‘leap,’ a basket, e.g. ‘seed-lip.’

The barley and oats firlot of 31 pints = 3230 cubic inches is the real Linlithgow firlot. It was the Edinburgh firlot increased to contain the same weight of malt, bear (barley) and oats as that contained of wheat.[^[32]] Its capacity was 11·6 gallons, and its Boll contained 46-1/2 gallons or 5·8 bushels. It was probably a Boll of about this capacity the dimensions of which, giving a capacity of about 43 gallons, were roughly stated in the Act of 1410 as those of the wine-boll.

The Chalder (of Culross) was 16 Edinburgh bolls.

I need scarcely do more than mention the smaller measures: to the Choppin (Fr. chopine), half a wine-pint; to the Mutchkin (Du. maatje), its quarter; to the Gill, its eighth, usually.

The measures of Scotland may be thus summarised: They appear to have all come from North Germany, except one from Provence.

The Ell was a length of 3 Rhineland feet, divided into 37 inches, approximately of English standard.

The Acre was a North German acker of 160 rods, each 6 Rhineland feet square.

The Pound was the Amsterdam standard of Troy = 7609 grains, multiplied and divided sexdecimally.

The old wine-boll = 17·8 gallons was the half-Cargo of Marseilles, divided into 16 pints of 41 Scots ounces.

The larger Stirling Jug was a North German ‘kanne’ of 104·2 cubic inches = 55 Scots ounces or 3 Imperial pints. It was the standard of corn-measure; the corn-firlots were multiples of it.

The common corn-firlot was a Rhineland cubic foot = 1000 Troy ounces or 18 Stirling Jugs. It was the North German Himt.

Another firlot was 19 lesser pints = 48-3/4 lb. Scots.

The Edinburgh Firlot of 21-1/4 Stirling Jugs or 2214 cubic inches was the North German Anker, become a corn-measure.

The Firlot of 31 Stirling Jugs was a wheat-firlot enlarged to hold about the same weight of oats.

2. Ireland

There are in Ireland many primitive Celtic measures worthy of study, if merely as showing the ways of thought of the people; but apart from these, the system of weights and measures, established for many centuries, has been the English system introduced in early Plantagenet times.

Some of these measures, relics of that time, long overlaid in England, are of interest; for instance, the gallon of 217 c.i. is one-eighth of the early wine-bushel = 1 cubic foot.

The Irish road and field measures, multiples of the seven-yard rod, have been noticed.

3. Wales

The general unit is the Cibyn (kibbin) = 4 gallons or 32 lb. of wheat, the English half-bushel or tuffet. It is divided into 4 quarts, and 16 cibyns make a Peg = 8 bushels or 1 quarter.

Measures on the English stone system are also used:

There is a Hobbet in England, but this is about a bushel.

The 5-span Ell survived in Wales for a long time as the Hirlath.

[31]. There was considerable intercourse between Marseilles and Scotland. The Scots custom of eating grey peas with oil on Carlin’ Sunday is taken from the Provençal custom of eating chick-peas on Palm Sunday; and the traditional reason, the arrival on that day, in famine-time, of a ship laden with pulse, is the same at Leith as at Marseilles.

[32]. It was a common custom formerly to measure corn by the shallow bushel, striked for wheat, heaped for lighter corn. The oats firlot of 31 pints was ordered to end the practice of giving ‘three straiked for two heaped measures [which] do exceed and are not just.’

CHAPTER XII
MEASURES AND WEIGHTS OF SOME BRITISH
DOMINIONS

1. The Channel Islands